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Summary
Summary
The final installment in Tim Pears's spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of change.
It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary , is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser-a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away.
Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and gender as she covertly studies to be a vet. But the steady rhythms of Lottie's practice, her comings and goings between her neighbors and their animals, will be blown apart by a violent act of betrayal, and a devastating loss.
In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways of life survive, and how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change? How can Leo, lost and wandering in the strange and brave new world, ever hope to find his way home?
The final installment in Tim Pears's exquisite West Country Trilogy, The Redeemed is a timeless, stirring, and exquisitely wrought story of love, loss, and destiny fulfilled, and a bittersweet elegy to a lost world.
Author Notes
Tim Pears is the author of ten novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten-part BBC series), Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2011, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011) and, most recently, The Wanderers . Married with two children, he lives in Oxford.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
Set during the first world war, the last instalment in Pears's exemplary series powerfully conjures a sense of bereavement for a world gone by Over the last three years, I've gained a new annual tradition. In the drained days of the new year, with the Christmas lights packed away and no reason to leave the house, I go to ground with the latest instalment of Tim Pears's West Country trilogy. His project - a layered, lyrical portrait of early-20th-century England, begun in January 2017 with The Horseman and continued in January 2018 with The Wanderers - concludes this year with The Redeemed , in which he draws the stories of his protagonists, Leo and Lottie, to something like a close. These are novels that, in their attentive, slow-building descriptions of a seasonal, rural world, attempt to reconnect us with something we've mostly lost: a sense of the rhythm of the natural realm and our place in it. By tying the publication of his books to a singular point on the calendar, Pears manages the neat trick of creating a physical connection between form and content; of amplifying the message of his books through the act of reading them. And with The Redeemed , that connection is intensified: the sense of homecoming that came with picking up the latest volume this month is echoed and augmented by the story between its covers. In the final book of Pears's trilogy, his wanderers are returning. Leo's road, in particular, has been winding. A carter's son with a rare affinity for horses, he was born in 1900 on an estate tucked into a Somerset valley on which the landowner's daughter, Lottie, was growing up, too. The first volume absorbs its readers into a long-vanished landscape in which Leo - silent, watchful - exists as a kind of spirit of the place, observing every creature, every leaf, every ripple in the weather with profound attention. Only Lottie is able to rouse him: a product of her environment too, she's nevertheless quicker, brighter, less accepting than he. The bond they form is deep, but it transgresses social hierarchies that are, in their way, as fixed and dictatorial as the seasons. Book two sees them forcibly sundered; exiled from Eden and thrown into a wider world from which, until then, they'd been sheltered. While Lottie's journey is largely metaphorical, a voyage from innocence to experience that reveals to her the limits imposed on her as a young woman, Leo's is literal. Ejected from his home, rejected by his family, he takes to the road, and encounters a colourful cast of fellow travellers (kindly Gypsies, brutal farmers, a philosopher-tramp, a shepherd who castrates lambs with his teeth) who open his eyes to possibilities and perils previously unimagined. By the end of the book, however, the tide of history has overtaken them. The first world war is upon Leo and Lottie, and the time for personal voyages is over. The Redeemed begins with Leo farther from home than ever. It's 1916, he's as old as the century and, like nearly every able-bodied boy, he's a tiny cog in the country's great war machine. Rather than churning over the mud of the trenches where, given Leo's skill with horses, he might easily have fetched up, Pears elects to send him north, to take the stage in a less mythologised theatre of war. Water swirls and swells through Pears's trilogy, frequently taking on additional meaning, and Leo begins the final instalment literally and figuratively at sea, as a deckhand on the HMS Queen Mary on the eve of the Battle of Jutland. For a series that trades on the intimate and the natural, the battle scene represents a whiplashing change of pace, and Pears dispatches it expertly, conveying its sound and fury through Leo's eyes, his outlook shaped by the countryside and the Bible. The sinking of the Queen Mary, in a frenzy of "fire and smoke and sulphur", calls to mind scenes from Revelation, while in the crackle of the deck's heat-scorched resin he hears "a noise like burning holly". In Somerset, meanwhile, though the fighting feels distant, its reverberations are deeply felt. Lottie manages to parlay the absence of young men into a job for herself as the local vet's assistant, a role in which she thrives until an encounter that serves as a violent reminder that not even war has eroded all the disadvantages of being born female. The trilogy earns Pears a place among a pantheon that stretches from Thomas Hardy to Flora Thompson While both protagonists survive their battles, they are irrevocably transformed by them. Pears follows their faltering, fumbling attempts to find a way back to each other and to themselves - a process that involves a reckoning with former ideas of what home is. The old, constant world in which the seasons unfolded with clockwork regularity and everyone knew their tasks has passed; The Redeemed looks to a future that offers new freedoms, but at great costs. "I'm a modern man, you see, Leo," offers the farmer on whose land Leo lives towards the end of the book, explaining the tractor in his yard. Of his horses, now redundant, he says airily: "The knacker's yard'll take 'em, if no one else will." As a piece of nature writing, Pears's West Country trilogy is exemplary, a feat of perception and description that earns him a place among a pantheon that stretches from Thomas Hardy to Flora Thompson. Its greatest achievement, however, may be in the sense of bereavement it conjures for a world gone by, and the accompanying awareness that, unless we start paying attention, we have just as much to lose in the future. For me, that sense is compounded by the realisation that my new tradition is over. What I'll do next January I don't know.
Kirkus Review
Battle, its aftermath, and the dawning of a new era shape the third episode of Pears' (The Wanderers, 2018, etc.) epic tale of lovelove for the land and between two long-separated souls.The pace rarely quickens in this deliberate concluding volume of Pears' trilogy of early-20th-century life, set in England's West Country during the transition from old farming and landscape traditions, through war, into the mechanical age. Nevertheless, separate moments of intense drama mold the lives of both landowner's daughter Lottie Prideaux and carter's son Leo Sercombe, who was cast out by his family years earlier. Like Ulysses, Leo has journeyed through multiple landscapes and perils before returning to the estate. As the novel opens he's a boy seaman in World War I, aboard HMS Queen Mary and about to enter the Battle of Jutland, which will see the death of nearly the entire crew, more than a thousand men and boys. Leo survives to become a deep sea diver, spending the postwar years helping salvage the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow and earning the money to buy himself "a field. A horse. A home." Lottie, meanwhile, is pursuing an interest in animal care and will become one of the first women to train as a vet. The stage is long set for the reunion of this pair whose class-spanning commitment to each other was made in childhood, but not before Pears once again lays down intensely detailed descriptions of workin the navy, in the salvage business, in stables, fields, and barnsacross the years. "Time proceeds along its ever-onward spiral. We join it for a moment," he observes, and in due course Leo and Lottie will converge. This book is less a climax, more the return of the native.Pears' achievement is in his fine evocation of an era that's largely been lost and in his attention to the natural world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The concluding volume in Pears' celebrated West Country trilogy (following The Horseman, 2017, and The Wanderers, 2018) again boasts lush descriptions of rural England and subtly penetrating character studies of individuals who say little but feel much. The novel begins with Leo Sercombe, a horseman from the West Country, out of his depth in the Royal Navy during WWI, serving aboard the HMS Queen Mary and, later, becoming a diver hired to help with the salvage of scuttled German ships in a Scottish harbor. Meanwhile, Lottie Prideaux, the daughter of a landowner in Somerset, whose forbidden love for plebeian Leo has not waned over their years apart, has defied gender conventions and become a veterinarian. Yes, this is in large part a love story, and we can't help but crave the reuniting of Leo and Lottie that we know is in the offing, but along the way to that reunion, what drives this moving novel is Pears' striking ability to capture the vivid detail and profound joy of working people doing the work they love Leo learning to dive and, later (a horseman once more), whispering a mare back to health; Lottie displaying her ability to birth horses and other large animals, despite the distrusting eyes of the males who have no choice but to call on her for help. This richly satisfying conclusion to a wonderful trilogy moves slowly but gracefully, imbued throughout with the poetry of nature.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist