By the King

In this mesmerising novella, set in the Battle of Britain in World War II, Miles Watson confronts head-on the human cost of war.

It’s not a book for everyone. To value this book, the reader has to be open to a little history. Don’t read this book if what you want is an episode of Dad’s Army, or a gung-ho adventure with cartoon heroes in a frenzy of derring-do. Don’t read this book if you want war sugar-coated, with the lie of a happy ending for the characters who matter and any intervening deaths being rare, sanitised, and either well-deserved or glorious.

The Battle of Britain wasn’t like that. War isn’t like that. And this is a serious book, albeit written in light, clever, occasionally amusing prose, skipping through the weeks of one pilot’s history with a brevity that carries you along, almost intoxicated.
It’s still serious.

Take stock.
The Battle of Britain, fought by Britain and its allies after Hitler's defeat of mainland Europe, was a defensive military campaign waged entirely by air forces, to defend the mainland of Britain from invasion. The human cost of this air defence was vast. The average life expectancy of a spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain was just four weeks. Most fighter pilots were boys in their early twenties. Many hundreds were killed, brutally, painfully, generally without achieving anything at all.

(Yes. These facts are gruelling. Like most facts about war, you may find them ‘depressing’. If you can’t take this, you really don’t need to start this book: it’s not going to get any better. Go elsewhere for your war stories. Plenty of comics are available.)

Against the real background of the Battle of Britain (Watson’s research is as always meticulous) his fictional hero is an ordinary man, in civilian life a mathematics teacher, who is deployed as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot. Mission after mission he sees his friends and companions head out and not return, and with punctilious care he calculates the odds of his own survival for each mission that he flies. They aren’t good. They only get worse.

The calculation of probability becomes an obsession. Somewhere in his nightmare journey from mission to mission, through the orgy of military and personal loss that occurs around all him, the obsession spirals from reason to unreason. The numbers take over. They assume an almost magical significance, imbued with a devastating drive which spills over into intentionality. The numbers are out to get him. He has nothing to hold onto except the inexorable certainty of his calculations – to the extent that he would perhaps prefer to be dead than disproved.

The characterisation is extraordinary, extreme, and yet impeccably believable. American though he is, Watson captures a British voice and sensibility that is utterly compelling. And beneath the unique, the personal, the fanatical preoccupation of his hero, there are more universal questions being asked. Watson isn’t an author who spoonfeeds his reader. If you’ve got this far, go read the novella. It’s only 40 pages, though you could give yourself a few months to think about it. 8 months perhaps - enough time for the Battle of Britain to run its course. Then answer the questions for yourself.