I spent years looking for this book once I found out it was a novel because I saw a movie adaptation of it that I’d taped off the telly one night but missed the first couple of minutes of because I was aiming for another show altogether. So I spent years looking for the movie without its title or without a notion of who wrote it or who was in it. When I did find out, I tried really hard to find the novel in my local bookshops (because I like to shop local when I can) and eventually resorted to the internet because I knew it would be there somewhere. Anyway...

Peplow has come to the town of Great Minden on the day of its annual fair because he knows that the man who killed his son will be there...

But there’s also an old friend from the war, crippled in a plane crash, who lives there, as well as their old CO and his son, roughly the same age as Peplow’s boy was. There’s also a whole undercurrent of small-town hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness. We meet a wide slice of the village population over the course of this day, from just before dawn until a few hours after dark. Honestly, it’s like Mr Carr read or listened to Under Milk Wood and thought it needed a little more gunplay.

But it works brilliantly. If I can carry the analogy a little further, Reverend Eli Jenkins is married to Polly Garter, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard still has a husband living with her and Captain Cat was maimed in the last war...

Where it differs from Dylan Thomas’ play for voices is that there’s a cheerful cynicism to the writing that would spoil the whole tone of the novel if we didn’t know that the author wasn’t enjoying himself as much as he is. Carr has as keen an eye as Thomas but he writes a little closer to the bone, possibly because the only person who ever let Thomas down was himself.

If there’s a fault to the writing it would be the coincidence of Peplow running into Ruskin and Bellenger (his Air Force colleagues) on the second-most momentous day of his life. But, as he wanders through the town like a First or Second Voice, you get a sense of the numinous and portentous looming over him so it doesn’t feel quite so stage-managed. And it’s worth it because the townsfolk all have their own stories to tell, or try to hide, and the gradual unravelling of the facade (if facades unravel, that is) is tremendous to behold.

I’m glad I finally found this book and that it was worth the wait to read it.