Sebastian Faulks' 13th novel is the work of a man with an eerie mastery of the form in its modern, popular incarnation. There is everything here: love, loss, death, war, history, memory, ideas, travel, friendship, rivalry, chance - and sex, plenty of that. It comes in an immaculately crafted package that combines an ingenious dual-timeline with plot twists that serve the reader with the exact impression of what it might be to live the life of the novel's gimlet-eyed and engaging narrator, Dr Robert Hendricks.
The first hook comes when Hendricks - who specialises in psychiatric disorders - needs to leave New York because he has slept with a prostitute. The details of the episode - the act, the reasons for it, and his subsequent shame - are forensic and comic, and set the tone for much of what follows: a sustained act of memory as Hendricks goes back over his life from the early years of the last century until the time these sections of the novel are set: the late 1970s.
The son of a tailor killed in World War I, Hendricks is solitary and bookish, but not freakishly so. For reasons that develop through the novel, he is interested in love: how it shapes us, defines our lives, and how we remember it: "Knowing no better, I assumed love affairs had summer dresses, bottled beers, untiring sex and dinner on the roof to the sound of a river running by."
Later, he is left wondering why love is the only emotion we allow to influence some of our most important decisions - marriage, for example.
The stimulus for this outpouring of remembrance is an invitation from one of his father's comrades, Alexander Pereira, also a doctor, who has information about Hendricks senior. The two share an interest in how memory works, and what we can do to bury, or unearth, harmful truths. These conversations provide the gravitational anchor, while Hendricks' memories of combat at Anzio provide the historical meat, like the trenches did in Birdsong. And just as in that novel, the thing that comes to define Hendricks is a love affair with a foreign girl: in this case Luisa, from Genoa, whom he meets after being wounded at Anzio.
