These stories owe a great deal to Hemingway, and if they don’t quite live up to Papa’s example they are still vivid, affecting records of soldiers’ experience in Afghanistan
First, a declaration of interest. I published a short story by Dan Clements a few years ago as part of the Galley Beggar Press ebook Singles series. You may see evidence of bias in the fact that I think his first novel What Will Remain is by some distance the best so far on the Not the Booker shortlist.
I think that this book’s connected stories about army life in Afghanistan – and what happens on the return home – are vivid and real and clearly born of the hard-won experience of Clements’s own time in the Royal Marines. They have emotional, almost physical heft; the descriptions of the Afghan terrain, and the mental landscapes of the various soldiers, seem real to me. The book is shot through with moments of genuine insight and intimacy – as when a soldier steps outside his air-conditioned pod into the strange “nighttime city smells” of Kabul and gets the “sudden dumb feeling” that he is on holiday.
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