Rain: A Novel by Barney Campbell - review

Rain: A Novel by Barney Campbell (Michael Joseph, £16.99)

No better on-the-ground description of Britain’s war in Afghanistan will ever be written. Rain is what Chickenhawk or, more recently, Matterhorn was to Vietnam. It’s unputdownable, except for when the reader needs to draw breath or battle a lump in the throat.

Rain is the account — memoir almost — of fictional cavalry officer Tom Chamberlain. It follows his days at Sandhurst (where an instructor motivates his charges with the advice “That c**t’s just killed your f**king mate, shoot him in his f**king Taliban face”) to pre-deployment routine in barracks — where the squaddies and young officers mull over if it’s more ally (Army speak for cool) to put one dog tag around the neck and one laced to the boot, in the event of an IED blowing the victim’s head to bits. And eventually to Afghanistan.

Intentionally or not, Campbell (a former Army officer who himself served in “the ’stan”) offers the story behind every fatality, every triple amputee, every post-traumatic stress victim the reader will recall from the years of grim headlines. Describing how the ammunition technical officers (bomb disposal) are treated like “rock stars” capable of “squaring up to colonels”, it’s impossible not to think of Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid — cool and self-assured going about his deadly business in the desert.

It’s not a read for the sensitive or the squeamish. One senior NCO warns his men that it might be better to die than “end up in the Paralympics”. Another vignette reveals that coffins for the fallen were often weighted with sandbags, so that at least the pall bearers could give the impression of carrying a proper, recognisable body rather than a few fragments of what was once a father, husband, son, brother, comrade.

The plot picks its way through Tom’s six-month tour — his two weeks’ R&R divided between a dreamy existence at his mother’s house in rural Kent and his on-off girlfriend in Chelsea, where the couple try to behave normally for the duration of his fortnight’s respite — walks through Battersea Park, hand-holding on Albert Bridge, pizzas in the backstreets of SW3.

Before returning to war, Tom visits amputees fresh out of Camp Bastion now recovering — or trying to survive — in the unlikely setting of Birmingham’s Selly Oak. It’s here that the young officer is jolted into realising the extent of the butcher’s bill behind the injuries he has heard detailed over the radio net as they are medevaced day after day, night after night.

Campbell’s description of the military funeral held in the Home Counties — just before Tom’s tour is due to end — is searing and palm-sweatingly horrible.

Be prepared to emerge from the closing pages of Rain feeling drained — and only half-convinced it was all worth it.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p