Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great Death has made all his for evermore. Waterlogged trench in WWIIn 1916, Captain John Hallows is reported killed in action in the Flanders fields of World War One. His death is only the first piece in a puzzle that takes decades for his daughter to ascertain the identity of her parents and the roles played by the constellation of people surrounding the events of this novel. At several points she feels she has all the pieces only to find a new fact that keeps her life a kaleidoscope of distorted images never quite forming a crisp, clear picture she can trust. As she unravels the truth from a nest of misdirection she discovers that...Everybody lies, everybody lies, everybody lies...,When Lieutenant Tom Franklin arrives at the Hallows manor house Moengate to recover from a shattered shoulder he received at the Battle of the Somme, he really was looking forward to meeting the wife and family of his good friend John Hallows. He doesn't find the pastoral English country setting he was expecting. The house is full of people, and oddly none of them are related to one another. With the death of Captain Hallows the strings attaching everyone together have been severed. Lord Powerstock is Captain John Hallows father. The Victorian age had vanished and left him, beached and bereft, in a world he no longer understood, where grief was merely a metaphor for all the sensations of his loss.Lady Olivia Powerstock is the 2nd Mrs. Hallows and is in all sense of the phrase a gold digger. Previously married to a painter Olivia is a woman lacking sexual restraint and has a feral capability that makes her dangerous to anyone associated with her. She has a steady stream of convalescing soldiers to seduce and does she ever seduce them. With Mae West curves accented by expensive, delicate, lingerie she finds few men can refuse her. Leonora Hallows is the wife of Captain Hallows. A beautiful widow that does not lack for suitors. She reveals that she is pregnant and as everybody starts counting on their fingers and discovers that Captain Hallows has been dead too long to be the father; the plot becomes murky with speculation. She is being blackmailed by Ralph Mompesson, but not necessarily for the reasons one might think.Lieutenant Tom Franklin soon falls in love with Leonora, barely avoids being seduced by the temptuous Olivia, and finds himself a mere pawn in the games of the household residents. Ralph Mompesson, the rich American arriving under a cloud of suspicion. He is the lover of Olivia, but is intent on seducing and marrying Leonora. He is so antagonistic that he makes enemies of everyone and when he ends up dead no one mourns his passing and everyone has motive. The suicide of a mentally war wounded soldier on the grounds after the murder provides easy closer for the case, but it is far from over. The investigation into the murder of Mompesson leaves more questions than answers. It made me think of the show Foyle's War where it seems so trivial investigating a murder when so many are being murdered on the fields of battle across the channel.Charter, John Hallows Grandfather, with the death of his grandson has lost all claim to his place at Moengate. He seems to be everywhere, an affable old man, a fly in the ointment that Olivia for one would like to see the last of, who knows much more about everything than what he is willing to tell. Now as I said earlier everyone lies in this novel, some to cover up their own guilt, some to protect those they think are guilty, and some just for the bloody hell of it. Half way through the novel all that I thought I knew was wrong. Three-quarters of the way through at least fifty percent of what I thought I knew was wrong. It is only when the final pieces are fitted together near the end that I could walk away from this novel at least thinking I know who, what, when and where. Excellent pacing in this novel and certainly brilliantly plotted and conceived. I'd tell you who done it, but then that wouldn't be any fun at all now would it?
Suzanne Donahue reviewed In Pale Battalions on OfftheShelf.com. Murder, Lies and Deception: A Juicy Family Secret Revealed After 60 Years by Suzanne DonahueOne of life’s pleasures is to accidentally find a book that completely engrosses you so much that you are transported to a different time and place. One of life’s sorrows is finding a book that engrosses you so completely that you read it too quickly, and before you are ready, POOF—it is over. Where only yesterday during your morning commute you were standing in an English manor house puzzling out a sixty-year-old mystery, today you are on a crowded subway looking at the people across from you and wondering how you got here.In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard is that kind of book. It starts off slowly; in fact, you might be a little bored at the beginning. Leonora, a recent widow, travels with her daughter, Penelope, to the Thiepval Memorial in France, which was built to commemorate the soldiers who died at the Battle of the Somme. Leonora has come here in order to share with her daughter the mystery of her birth and the story of her life. They look up the details of Captain John Hallows, Leonora’s father, and Penelope realizes that her mother was born a year after her father fell in battle. Her mother’s illegitimacy is what Penelope believes she is there to learn, but that is just the tip of a twisted, compelling, multi-character story that keeps her and the reader guessing till the end.Leonora begins to tell Penelope the story of her youth, and with that you are swept back to Meongate, the ancestral home of the Hallows family, ruled over by Lord and Lady Powerstock. Leonora is an orphan, her father dead in the war and her mother dead from giving birth. The only family she has left is her cold, distant grandfather and his vain, manipulative second wife, Olivia. In Olivia, Robert Goddard has created one of the most evil, nasty bullies I have ever met. Maleficent would be proud to call her sister.When she is fifteen, Lord Powerstock dies and Leonora’s life goes from bad to worse as she is left alone with Olivia, trapped by shame and fear after learning the truth about her birth and finding that she has been disinherited by her grandfather and left penniless. She spends years enthralled to Olivia until she manages to escape into a loving marriage.At the beginning of this book you think you are going to read Leonora’s story, but in fact hers is just a prelude to the brilliant, complicated story of her parents, the war, a murder, unrequited love, and some serious treachery. Part two is told by Lieutenant Tom Franklin, a fellow officer who fought alongside Leonora’s father and winds up at Meongate to recuperate from wounds he received at the front. (Think the soldiers who convalesced at Downton Abbey.) He is an outsider who does not fit comfortably into the world of the aristocracy and believes he is immune to their wiles, but he is not, and soon he finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into the world of half-truths and buried secrets that is Meongate until he winds up the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Franklin works to untie the knots—as you realize Leonora has tried to do for so many years—but he can only get so far and the story is picked up again by Leonora.Everywhere you look in this story there is trickery and deception, and just as you think you have figured it out—like Leonora—you are presented with a new clue or conundrum that changes your mind completely. I felt like I was reading Daphne du Maurier.I was hooked by the writing and the story till the very satisfying end and was truly sorry when it was over. Now I guess I’ll have to find out what else Robert Goddard has written for my subway ride home.
What do You think about In Pale Battalions (1989)?
Everyone has a few skeletons hidden in their closets but Leonora Galloway-Hallows has a whole cemetery behind those doors. Born and raised in a well to do family and married an aristocratic man. After the marriage she lived in the grand estate of Meongate in 1917 where she was surrounded by hostile or indifferent people. Her father, Captain John Hallows was killed in the Battle at the Somme and her mother died shortly after her birth. Leonora’s grandfather, Lord Powerstock and his second wife Lady Powerstock were indifferent and hostile to their young granddaughter. Life, in general, was sad and depressing for young Leonora and as time passed it only got worse. This story is written in the early twentieth century English style with the addition of the more modern elements of graphic nudity and insinuated sexuality. The usual verbiage that is often poetical and occasionally confusing is absent in this contemporary work, making it a very engrossing and readable prose. A murder is committed and in true Doylian fashion, deductions are made and remade with little help of forensic science. The suspense and plot develop as an approaching locomotive. You see it as a dot in the distance and can only rely on the assumption that the iron tracks at your feet must mean that the dot is the train you feel sure will arrive shortly. As time passes and the story continues, the plot develops and you are soon moved as with the accompanying winds of a speeding train. With In Pale Battalions, Robert Goddard has created a masterpiece in the old style. It is a story written in such a way that is sure to please any turn of the century literature lover.
—Thom Swennes
I enjoyed the plot of this and read the book in two days; I thought it was well-written and evocative of the time it was set in. My one cavil was that the characters did not seem well rounded -- they seemed to exist to push the story along, rather than the other way around. The women were particularly disappointing, particularly the stock villainess of a step-mother, complete with siren looks and impaccable ambition. The 'good' female protagonist was also one dimensional -- noble and perfect. I wished for quirks and surprises, which is why Goddard misses the richness of du Maurier, to whom he is often compared.
—Heidi
This is another superb book by Goddard. His books are invariably filled with unnexpected plot twists -- though I confess that I anticipated the final twist long before it came. But this one has more than most. Some may find the use of multiple first person narrative confusing. With a less skilled story teller, I surely would. And closer study may reveal some contradictions in the narrative as a consequence of that means of development. But it worked very well with me.I do recommend that you not get too deeply into a Goddard novel unless you have half a day to spare. You reach a point where there is no putting them down.The characters are fascinating and their development convincing. The one feature that I found a bit off-putting with Goddard's novels is the completely irrational, foolish behavior that he attributes to his central characters on the basis of their Dante-like passion.
—Robert
