Friends and Enemies by Richard Woolley

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This is the third novel by Richard Woolley and once again he has delivered a captivating read.

Since reading the last one I have found out that while they were all published together they were written over a period of years, and by chance I have read them in the order of their creation.

This time the canvass seemed bigger, we take in a story arc which ranges from the eve of the Second World War to the present and action on both sides of the Berlin War at the height of the Cold War.

As with the other works this is at its core a search for identity but sex and sexuality are perhaps less central to that search this time round. That is not to say that sex is absent, and our central character Jon probably learns more about his Mother's sexual past than most sons would wish to.

In taking on Nazis, Communists, and Capitalists there is significant risk that the novel would simply become glib. However this is avoided because the characters we encounter are not simply card board cut outs – the SS Officer is an unsympathetic character, but not simply or specifically because he is an SS Officer.

That said, it is still a political novel and therefore your appreciation of it might well vary depending on your politics – and I would probably have to admit that my own enjoyment of it might well be due an alignment between the novel and my own world views. It is anti-system, irrespective of the system, it privileges personal integrity over political “truths” or ideology, left-lending but too libertarian to subscribe to most of the “solutions” offered by “the Left”.

The earlier two novels used diaries as a device to deliver part of the narrative. Here that role is taken by the finding of the Mother's novel-style account of the events of her early life. This is a slightly awkward device in the sense that her writing of a “novelization” of her life and its discovery in far flung fragments decades later is somewhat contrived. The discovery of a diary might have been a more straight forward mechanism for the son, Jon, and the reader to learn what had gone before.

As I reflected on the first novel “Back in 1984” again I found that the final chapter or two tidies too many loose ends – I think Woolley would have created a more authentic narrative if Jon, and us, were left with some doubts and questions