Book review: do we need another Second World War novel? First Time Solo by Iain Maloney

"Our time here is infinitesimally small in the span of geological time yet we fill it with such importance." So says one of the four trainee RAF pilots of First Time Solo, musing upon the nature of humanity in the midst of the Second World War. The question this may prompt the reader to ask is, in this infinitesimally small time we have is there really need for yet another novel set during the Second World War?

 

Iain Maloney’s debut to some extent justifies its existence with riffs on the relationship between war and music. His narrative follows Jack Devine, an aspiring pilot from a remote Aberdeenshire farm with an unusual zeal for jazz. This allows Maloney to play with the synchronicity between losing oneself in music and in flight, to juxtapose the liberation of music with the repression of war. He persuasively uses the mesmeric rhythms of jazz as a means by which to escape the terror of reality; Jack frees himself from the "barriers, frontiers, prison bars" of notation to play his trumpet with true abandon.

 

Jack befriends and forms a jazz band with fellow recruitees Joe, Terry and Doug – a union that gives them a tantalising picture of their potential future, were they not facing imminent death in the fight against "Jerry". The boredom, exhilaration, hard graft and horror of training are all present in this novel, but are never quite conjured with real potency. And as Joe becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous, the friendships break down and so does the legitimacy of the plot – the lethal tricks Joe plays begin to seem contrived simply to create dramatic urgency, not only tricking the characters but also the reader into thinking they should feel emotion rather than genuinely inducing it.

 

Maloney fluctuates between traditional narrative and stylistic play with short, sharp sentences, which disintegrate convincingly at points into fragmented half-thoughts as Jack struggles to process his experiences. Sometimes this works, sometimes it feels overly simplistic rather than poetic. Tellingly, the note at the back of the book in which Maloney cites his own grandfather’s experiences as the inspiration forFirst Time Solo retrospectively gives the whole narrative more emotional heft. But that impact just isn’t there in the novel itself, and after a rather anticlimactic ending it feels like Maloney never quite gets off the training blocks and truly takes flight.

This review was first published on We Love This Book.

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