Sam Bourne’s new thriller, Pantheon (HarperCollins, £12.99), is set just after Dunkirk in the darkest days of the second world war. James Zennor, an experimental psychologist, returns to his family’s Oxford home to discover that his biologist wife has disappeared, taking with her their two-year-old son. Zennor, scarred in body and mind by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, fears that she may have fled from his ungovernable rages. Or was she acting under coercion? He pursues her to neutral America where uncomfortable truths gradually emerge in another university city.
This novel is something of a departure for Bourne. Zennor’s emotional fragility lends an extra dimension to a powerful plot, skilfully constructed and narrated. There are some wonderful glimpses of other worlds and other times — the Barcelona People’s Olympics of 1936, for example, and the Siege of Madrid (echoes of Esmond Romilly, here).
Bourne’s publishers claim that this is the most explosive wartime thriller since Robert Harris’s Fatherland.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in