Sebastian Faulks turns to Palestine in his 17th novel
Farewell to Eden, reviewed in the Guardian, follows a British officer haunted by his posting during the last years of the Mandate.
Sebastian Faulks has published his seventeenth novel, Farewell to Eden, set in 1946 as Britain's mandate over Palestine collapses toward its 1948 withdrawal, according to a review in the Guardian. The book follows Philip Deval, an infantry officer who fought at Normandy and is now deployed to the Holy Land as second in command of a battalion trying to hold the peace between Jewish and Arab communities.
The Guardian's review notes that Faulks, best known for the trench warfare of Birdsong, here trades combat for a peacekeeping role, using Deval's posting to examine what it calls Britain's 'profound failures and manipulation' in the region before its departure. Privately, the reviewer writes, Deval is consumed by a melancholy that predates his time in Palestine, shaped by his war record and other slowly revealed tragedies, and what he witnesses in the Middle East only deepens his doubts about human nature and any notion of divine benevolence.
No French publication or translation of the novel has been announced in the material available.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
