I found this one a few years ago after reading Holland’s
excellent Jack Tanner series – think Richard Sharpe for World War Two, and
you’re on the right track – and somehow it got lost in the avalanche of other
books I wanted to read.
A few weeks before Anzac Day, with my mind on all things military,
I finally got around to reading The Burning Blue and I loved every single page.
It’s party a love story and partly a frighteningly real account of Royal Air
Force fighter pilots during the desperate months where the German Luftwaffe
were pressing hard against British targets, a softening-up process that was
supposedly the beginning of Hitler’s plans to invade England.
In the end, the German threat was eradicated, and after so
much bad news – not least of which came at Dunkirk – the Battle of Britain showed
the British people that they could indeed strike a victory against the Germans,
who had scarcely been slowed down since their war machine cranked into gear.
Holland’s narrative actually begins a few years after the
Battle of Britain, and finds the main character, Joss Lambert, a fighter pilot
with the RAF, injured in a Cairo hospital after sustaining a nasty wound
supporting British infantry in the fight against Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The
story switches back and forth from Cairo to during and before the Battle of
Britain.
Joss is something of a loner. His mother lives in London,
the mistress to some high-ranking British politician after divorcing her second
husband some years before the war, and Joss’ father is also dead. Furthermore,
he’s burdened by a secret that is becoming increasingly difficult to carry
about: his father was not only German, but also a German deserter from the
First World War.
Joss has long been friends with Guy Liddell, whose family
owns the idyllic Alvesdon farm, which has become a sanctuary for Joss. Guy is
amongst a very select few who know the truth about Joss’s father. Obviously, in
wartime England, being the son of a German would bring with it all sorts of
unpleasantness – internment camps and the like. Guy’s twin sister and his
parents are closer to family than Joss’s own. His relationship with his mother
is a difficult one.
Outside of the cocoon of Alvesdon Farm, though, war is
brewing, and it seems inevitable that the Germans will once again need to be
stopped in Europe. Joss and Guy leave for university, but that experience is
soon put on hold due to the outbreak of war, and when Guy returns to run the
farm after the unexpected death of his father, Joss heads in a different
direction: he joins the RAF with some friends, and trains to become a fighter
pilot as the British army reels from one disaster after another, including
Dunkirk.
During regular visits back to Alvesdon, Joss begins to fall
in love with Stella, Guy’s sister, and it isn’t long before the feeling is
proven to be mutual. That lengthens the divide between Joss and Guy – one man
fighting, the other running a farm – and leads to some conflict. It wasn't hard
to see where the whole Joss-Stella thing was going to end up, but Holland does
it well, as he does well explaining some of Guy’s guilt over working his
father’s farm whilst his friends are fighting and dying.
The aerial dogfight scenes are excellent and seem to be
pretty realistic, too. The pressures put on the pilots must have been extreme.
Their stoicism in the face of heavy casualties was illustrated well by Holland,
and just when you think that the final chapters are leading to a disappointing
conclusion, there’s a stunning revelation…and then the book just ends. You
don’t find out what happened to Joss or Stella, and Guy’s backstory leads
nicely into the Jack Tanner books. It was kind of a letdown to reach the end
and find it wasn't really the end.
Here’s hoping the open-ended finish means a sequel! Or, at
the very least, some reference to Joss and Stella and the others in a Tanner
book sometime soon.
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