It is the German prisoner who becomes the transforming spirit for Esther, Rotheram and the book's counterwar theme. Karsten has a quasi-angelic force, yet the author never makes him less than real or more than modest. We meet him first in a coastal defense bunker awaiting the Allied landings. When flamethrowers are brought in, Karsten, the only English-speaker, is sent out. "How do you do," he manages, briefly convulsing the British captors.
His fellow prisoners treat him with bitter suspicion, partly because of his English, but mostly because, effecting the surrender, he symbolizes defeat. In the camp set up in Wales, they organize a harsh military discipline, punish waverers, refuse to believe the liberation — the fall, to them — of Paris. Toward the end, after Karsten briefly escapes and lets himself be recaptured, they beat him severely.
The prisoners represent the dehumanization of war and national purpose, as do the British guards. Karsten comes, not easily, to see something beyond. His escape attempt is not military defiance but the need for freedom. And also for what he sees in Esther, who, like the other villagers, has stood by the wire to watch the prisoners.
During his brief flight he hides in her barn; she feeds him, they talk and eventually make love. For her, he too represents a release from confinement; even his name signifies a wider world. They have freed each other, and Karsten, giving himself up, realizes that freedom can come with surrender as well as escape. And when Rotheram tours the POW camps, Karsten argues him out of his own longstanding shame: that of having surrendered, in effect, by fleeing Germany.
In a long epilogue we hear more of Karsten. Released toward the war's end to work the land, he spends the winter tending the sheep on Esther's farm before returning to Germany. (Davies, who has beautifully delineated their love, avoids a romantic climax.) A villager recalls the locals' joke that caring for sheep, after all, is a kind of guard duty.
And he recalls Karsten's reply, summing up this quietly stirring book: "But he never liked that, said he'd rather be a bad shepherd than a good guard any day."
RSS