Book description
The final offensives of the Second World War - Arnhem, the Rhine
crossing and the invasion of Germany - provide war-shattered settings
for John Prebble's novel, The Edge of Darkness. In this, the most
intimately experience of all his books, he records the feelings and
reactions (seldom heroic) of five very different members of a front-line
searchlight troop. But victory and vengeance breed anti-climax. In the
rubble of post-war Hamburg, with its currency of cigarettes and its
sinister black market, and in the brief, flickering affair between Ted
Jones and a tragic German widow John Prebble faithfully portrays Germany
in defeat. Like Culloden, his famous account of the Forty-five, The Edge
of Darkness is neither cheerful nor glorious. It is a grim but just
epitaph on war.
