Sebastian Faulks’ Farewell to Eden is a slow-moving, brackish affair; in many ways it is nothing new. Like many of his most famous, formally achieved works, the novel tries to read the entrails of the 20th century through the life of a Western European soldier: our protagonist here is Philip Deval, a former army major with a PhD in philosophy, present once in Normandy and in Mandatory Palestine. Using a structure Faulks presumably thinks synonymous with depth of insight and of vision, it likewise flits across character perspective and decade. Following on from Faulks’ turn towards speculative fiction in The Seventh Son (2023), Farewell to Eden is again a novel with self-consciously philosophical ambitions. It is not a good one.
It begins in England in 1951. As readers of Faulks’ fiction can probably guess, this is not really the beginning at all. Philip is in a train compartment that smells of cigarettes and hot dust, and the passing scenes have a responsibly synoptic and national character: amongst market towns and village halts there are glimpses of factories and "yards of idle vans", which give way to "the woods of an ancestral landscape". Philip is about to start as a French schoolmaster at Witchelm, a girls’ boarding school; we will later learn he has been unable to find work in the Foreign Office or at British Tobacco. Probably for the first time in its history, the school is run by women who have been able to take university degrees. Happily for Faulks, this fact allows for an early and efficient précis of novel’s Big Theme, which is belief in God after the Holocaust. "Theology", ultimately, "is the study of delusion." Or so Deputy Headmistress and fresh air enthusiast Dr. Chilvers tells us.
Philip does not believe in God either and is much more uneasy about it. ‘He was not sure about Christ being the “son” of God’, Faulks expositions, ‘or about the function of the Holy Ghost’. He also struggles not to drink alcohol when alone or nervous, and has emotionally distant parents. In this state of mild frigidity he finds a fellow traveller and companionship in Frances Danuta Darwood ("Double D", walk-on misogynist Mr Linwall calls her). As readers of (for example) Snow Country (2021) will be aware, Frances’ ill-explained emotional hinterland and love of orchestral music marks her out as the novel’s prime romantic interest. At this point, though, they merely take to having cocoa together at night, which in turn provides the manoeuvre-room for Faulks to shift focus to their experiences of the Second World War and its build up. She is also switched on enough to recognise the symbolic and narrative significance of the conspicuously unexplained and un-described card that arrives "from the Holy Land" for Philip at the beginning of December. "Christmas", she announces (all Faulks’ characters speak in announcements), "is a time of ghost stories."
Cue said ghost stories. These cover Philip’s time at university and his relationship with his former fiancée Alice, but for the most part they relate to his time in the Palestinian Police Force following the end of the Second World War. It is 1947: the year before British military presence ends ("we want to go home and eat Yorkshire puddings," one character says), the year before the foundation of Israel, the year before the permanent displacement of half of the then-present Palestinian population. In these sections Faulks’ prose benefits from the horror and inanity of its facts: a schoolteacher answers a question about where she is from by saying "Bergen Belsen"; a dim Priapic soldier from the East End will meanwhile refer to Jews as "Bagels", uncorrected. Grains of human flesh are caught amongst the clothes of those who have been murdered in the King David Hotel Massacre, a terrorist attack organised by the Zionist group Irgun. The same dim Priapic soldier will later "help" a young woman by having sex with her, because she believes that this might expedite her entry into the country.
Replete with references to London’s rubble, a fledgling National Health Service and access to contemporary plastics, scenes in England instead have the tropy, familiar feel of a bedtime story. The difference is not uninteresting, and I think reflects Faulks’ use of source material: from the Author’s Note we learn that his representation of England is derived from David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain and Family Britain. Details from Mandatory Palestine’s slow-then-abrupt descent into sectarian and ethnic violence on the other hand is drawn from less-known primary sources: the journal of a Uruguayan UN delegate, for instance, and the oral histories given by British soldiers now housed at the Imperial War Museum. This difference is perhaps Faulks’ point. As he goes on to claim, public response to Palestinian genocide following Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 shows our putative ignorance as to the region’s geopolitical and religious history. In displaying some of these facts, he is successful.
We might be reminded, however, of what Anna Wulf writes towards the beginning of The Golden Notebook, considering the defunct philosophic currency of modern realist fiction: most novels are original only "in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness". But set beside repeat references to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and the Catholic socialist Simone Weil, Faulks’ ability as a researcher also doubles as a reminder of his fundamentally wooden soul. Not helped by Philip’s lack of faith or by Faulks’ apparent wish for the book to double as a thesis on the current misery of the Holy Land, Philip’s feelings are expressed in sub-undergraduate profundities and explanatory dialogue. "It seems to me that this Jehovah was the Balfour of his day," he tells his commanding officer and spiritual interlocutor Matthew; towards the end of the novel, he talks of his wish for "revenge on God [...] for not existing".
Generously, we might call this a piece of existentialist realism: Philip has experienced and participated in a world without any moral absolutes, and attempts to find or imagine a philosophical system within it must always sound trite. With a few exceptions, this approach means that you have also written a novel that always sounds trite, too. As becomes very clear in his closing remarks ("tumbling into purity […] he surrendered to the chaos"), Faulks is not exceptional at all.
- Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks (Penguin, £22)
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