Beyond the Broken Gate

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Category:	Fiction
Author:	Sylvie Nickels
Publisher:	Oriole Press
Price:	£7.99
ISBN:	095186716-286
Pages:	286
Reviewed in issue:	9

Three wartime stories, overlapping one another, converge in an Oxfordshire village in the early 21st century.

The hurried prologue put me off a little. A full account of Jake and Pete’s wartime friendship would have taken too long; but the sheer weight of emotion felt by Jake at the loss of his friend is lacking in this highly condensed version of events. The trend continues in Jake’s whirlwind non-romance with Annie, as the author rushes on to the “real” story.

This novel is not really about war, but about human relationships. Some of the main characters, such as the Bosnian girl Minkie, have been traumatized by war and its aftermath, but their interaction with one another and with the sometimes claustrophobic environment of the village of Daerley is the book’s true theme.

The web of relationships is repeatedly manipulated through the diary of the late Justin Wyndham-Smith, a man who (unless I have missed something) must have been well in his nineties when he moved to Daerley and over a hundred when he died – though none of the other characters ever seem to comment on this. It is my only real quibble with the carefully-constructed, and very complex, plot.

The characters are interesting and mostly well-defined, and for sheer variety it is difficult to fault; but I found it irritating that different characters often used identical conversational quirks. Better proof reading and a little bit of thoughtful editing could have improved the book considerably.

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