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A review by muggsyspaniel
The Fall Of The Sparrow by Nigel Balchin
5.0
What a cracking read, I fairly bowled through this. I don't think it can be said too often that Balchin is eminently readable.
The Fall of the Sparrow concerns Jason Pellew and opens as his friend and our narrator Henry Payne watches as Pellew is on trial and facing a couple of years in prison for various crimes such as stealing a car, passing dud checks and selling the contents of another chaps flat in which he was staying.
Payne then takes us back to childhood when he first meets Pellew. They are near neighbors and end up at the same school. Henry is a couple of years older than Jason and he tries to look out for him without getting too involved. Years later they are at Cambridge together and break up fascist black shirt meetings with the communists. Still later we see them in the blitz and their wartime exploits. Finally after the war there is Jason's marriage to a wholly unsuitable woman. The point of the story seems to be Henry's attempts to understand why Jason should have fallen from grace so completely.
I loved the minor characters and felt genuinely upset at the fate of some of them while the main players are brilliantly drawn messy human beings.
A five star beauty that should be ranked up with The Small Back Room and Darkness Falls From the Air.
The Fall of the Sparrow concerns Jason Pellew and opens as his friend and our narrator Henry Payne watches as Pellew is on trial and facing a couple of years in prison for various crimes such as stealing a car, passing dud checks and selling the contents of another chaps flat in which he was staying.
Payne then takes us back to childhood when he first meets Pellew. They are near neighbors and end up at the same school. Henry is a couple of years older than Jason and he tries to look out for him without getting too involved. Years later they are at Cambridge together and break up fascist black shirt meetings with the communists. Still later we see them in the blitz and their wartime exploits. Finally after the war there is Jason's marriage to a wholly unsuitable woman. The point of the story seems to be Henry's attempts to understand why Jason should have fallen from grace so completely.
I loved the minor characters and felt genuinely upset at the fate of some of them while the main players are brilliantly drawn messy human beings.
A five star beauty that should be ranked up with The Small Back Room and Darkness Falls From the Air.