Emergency” in Cyprus meant blasts from bombs and riots in the streets, with the British on one side determined to maintain the law and order in the Crown colony, and on the other resistance fighters belonging to EOKA just as intent on severing the island's ties to Britain so that they might be reattached to Greece; 1955 was when it all ignited.
To get all the lines straight in your head, all the colonial politics and passions, to get at the core of the thing, you might be best to dip into a book like William Mallinson's Cyprus: A Modern History. Another kind of a book to read would be Sadie Jones's seriously good new novel, but just don't expect any history lesson.
Jones, who lives in London, won a Costa First Novel Award for The Outcast (2008). Small Wars is a map on a different scale, with all the complex contours right there in front of you. You'd swear you can feel the heat and the danger radiating off them like an element on a stove. Cyprus may be the background for Jones's taut second novel, but at the fore is an emergency with the precise dimensions and frailties of a marriage.
Small Wars, by Sadie Jones, Knopf Canada, 376 pages, $29.95
Whatever the stuff is that they make British army officers out of, Hal Traherne has it all. There's breeding in there, some solid family tradition, a fair dose of molten patriotism. In 1946, as the novel opens, he's on the parade square at Sandhurst, an officer cadet whose best British middle-class upbringing has been polished and primed for this, the day he graduates. It's his proudest day, and he'll go marching on from Sovereign's Parade straight off to stand for England in whatever war she needs to fight next, wherever it needs to be fought.
And Clara Ward will go too. She has a brother at Sandhurst, but it's Hal she watches on parade, and it's him she'll dance with at the ball that night and, soon enough, marry and follow to Germany and beyond. It's with great precision that Jones sets the two of them together in her prologue; in no more than a dozen pages, she renders all the possibility of two lives about to become one, the anticipation and rising joy – all that and just how little they really know about one another and what lies ahead. Of course, I'm not going to be able to divulge just how it all blows apart, 100 pages later. The only spoiler alert I'll offer is that I'm not going to be one.
Prologue past, the story moves over to Episkopi, near Limassol on the Cypriot south coast. It's January, 1956, and Clara and her twin girls are on their way to meet Hal. Promoted to major, he has been called from his battalion in Germany to command a company at the sharp end of the British response to EOKA. But. A snag. Married quarters aren't available in the garrison, and the family will have to take a house in town. Hal worries. Is it safe? Clara does what she knows best: She makes do. But that's what army life is all about: coping.
Hal, newly in love, thinks of Clara as a country he has only ever seen in an atlas, as exotic as India
