Vanishing by Gerard Woodward (Picador)
by Patrick O'Connor
YOU certainly can't accuse author Gerard Woodward of producing a light-weight book.
Packed into the 500 pages of Vanishing are several different tales from several different eras.
It's a first person narration by Kenneth Brill, who when we first meet him, is in a British prison sometime in the latter stages of the Second World War.
Although he has had a pretty impressive record as a part of a specialised unit helping Allied troops with camouflage in North Africa, he now stands accused of making paintings of farmland around the hamlet of Heathrow which is about to turned into a giant military airbase – for the benefit of the Nazis!
Brill's interrogation is used as tool to examine his life story – he grew up around 'the Heath', an area which is now set to be turned upside down.
What follows is an emotional examination of what it was like to be a homosexual in the 30s and how Brill struggled to come to terms with it. Along the way in this complex unravelling, we encounter life in a public school, a very seedy Soho during the war years including Brill's unusual dalliance with prostitutes and the drama of the North African military campaign.
Brill comes across as an unfortunate character, forever doomed to experience one calamity after all but ultimately he is someone we warm to.