The Separation

Imagine you wrote a story with a twist at the end, but moved that twist to the very early part, and then added in another twist a little further on, and then another and another and another. That is this book.

At its heart it's the story of identical twin brothers who, after winning a bronze medal for rowing in the 1936 Munich Olympics, find their strongly held political differences over the coming war force them apart. One becomes a RAF pilot and the other a conscientious objector. But this is not an 'at the heart' kind of novel. It is filled with distractions, body doubles, alternate histories, hallucinations, personal insecurities, power struggles, romance and jealousies, and probably other conflicts that I have missed.

The twins are both J.L. Sawyer, Joe and Jack. Rudolph Hess presents their medals and jokes about twins playing tricks on people, but it's Hess (and Churchill) who later don't effectively separate them. Then we add in that Churchill recruits Jack as Aide de Camp on his trips through bombed out London to encourage the locals and Jack soon realises he's working for a body double. Ironically, the real Churchill sends Jack to interrogate a high ranking German prisoner, especially to determine if the man is who he said he is. The prisoner is Hess who had flown to Britain trying to broker a peace accord. Jack determines that it's not the real Hess, but another body double.

Priest uses memoirs, press reports, private papers, and release war documents to build up the story. Jack and Joe each have long sections telling of their experiences, one flying bombing missions into Germans and the other driving an ambulance after bombing raids on London. The reader notices that certain dates don't match, such as the war ending in 1941, but later the war ended in 1945. We realise that there are two histories running parallel through the novel and Priest has woven them into the story so well that we hardly notice the transition. So we start to take much more notice of the documents he's quoting, trying to see where the following narrative falls.

Both brothers are injured. Jack is shot down returning from a raid and rescued after hours in a life raft. But his navigator later says that he was the only survivor of the crash. Joe's ambulance is hit by a bomb and in one portion of the story he's killed but in another place he's knocked out and later found in a hostel in London with severe concussion which results in severe and repeated hallucinations. The movement between these different histories is sometimes subtle and sometimes jarring, but they weave in and out of the novel like strands of a rope.

It is as if Priest wanted to tell a story that was at once clear and at the same time confusing. He succeeded. The book is fascinating and engaging and it's no wonder that it was awarded literary prizes on publication.