If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

A critically acclaimed, Booker long-listed novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration Trilogy’.
Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice’s cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to grope towards what real manhood might be.

‘If the Invader Comes’ combines themes from Derek Beaven’s previously acclaimed ‘Newton’s Niece’ and ‘Acts of Mutiny’ to portray a wartime England where human relationships are threatened as much from within the family as from occupied Europe. Exciting, moving and ultimately optimistic, Derek Beaven’s new novel represents a daring leap in British fiction.

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Siobhan Markwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the Invader Comes was an unexpected triumph. War stories are not my first literary love but this book not only gives a sense of the terror Londoners, particularly East Londoners, must have felt during the blitz but also sketches some memorable characters and a believable dysfunctional marriage under pressure from a gangland spiv empowered by the wartime black market. From Dunkirk to D Day, we see some troop's eye accounts of WWII. Beaven offers us well-researched descriptions of life along the Thames docks and in the shanty shack developments that were later compulsory purchased and razed and now lie under the Essex town of Basildon. This is beautifully written, pacy and empathetic.