A small masterpiece with a vast canvas - three major wars of the twentieth century, no less - and a strong emotional charge, this is a taut, moving novel about old men, young men and war, about memory and imagination and the gap between.
Old man Maclver, military historian and one-time centre for Scotland's rugby team ('quite quick in his day'), recently widowed, has holed up in his holiday home. He makes rules to 'stop the rot', as he and his house crumble away - what he must burn, when he should eat, how to write something every day . . . Gradually a strange and gripping parallel tale is
born, of men in the trenches of the Great War (Sergeant Braddis, king of No Man's Land, with his pincer-like nails; Private Callum, the quietly subversive artist; Lieutenant Simon Dodds, decent and unremarkable; and salt-of-the-earth Private Charlie Alston, caught up in a story of inhumanity and betrayal); while Maclver recalls, too, his own experiences in WWII, and tries not to think about the later war which took his son away. He wants to make sense of his marriage, his own anger and innate violence, matching these against the turbulent century through which he has lived.
It's winter and he is dying; but his memories, tender, sardonic, even hopeful, glint as brightly as a gold watch in the Flanders mud.
Masterly in its evocation of different times and wars, miraculous in its restraint, 'Rules For Old Men Waiting' is an unsettling reflection of the classical unities, and a distillation of a lifetime's wisdom in an outstanding first novel.
