Overview

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.

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9781841155920

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Reviews

'Offers reminders of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair ![A] powerful, sharply conceived novel.' The Times 'The novel's chief strength derives from a psychological delicacy: a file of scrupulously observed temperaments, ground down by circumstance, expressing themselves in dialogue pitched just on the right side of fracture. Beaven excels, too, in descriptions of physical sensation!All the abilities shown in his excellent second novel, Acts of Mutiny , are well to the fore.' D.J. Taylor, Independent 'This is the kind of fiction we like!Beaven imagines the war background so completely that you almost forget what actually happened![he] shows it as clear as a Vermeer mirror.' David Robertson, Scotsman 'Large, deft, prickly and ambitious. Beaven weaves a highly convincing and alarming picture of a country sinking into a state of war. You believe in everything Beaven tells you because his work practically explodes with narrative assurance.' Julie Myerson, Guardian

'Offers reminders of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair...[A] powerful, sharply conceived novel' The Times 'The novel's chief strength derives from a pyschological delicacy: a file of scrupulously observed temperaments, ground down by circumstance, expressing themselves in dialogue pitched just on the right side of fracture. Beaven excels, too, in descriptions of physical sensation...All the abilities shown in his excellent second novel, Acts of Mutiny, are well to the fore'. D J Taylor in Independent 'This is the kind of fiction we like... Beaven imagines the war background so completely that you almost forget what actually happened... [he] shows it as clear as a Vermeer mirror.' David Robertson, Scotsman 'Large, deft, prickly and ambitious. Beaven weaves a highly convincing and alarming picture of a country sinking into a state of war. You believe in everything Beaven tells you because his work practically explodes with narrative assurance.' Julie Myerson, Guardian

Derek Beaven is already the author of two acclaimed historical fictions. In his third novel, set during World War II, he gives us three misfits: Clarice Pike, removed from her East End background to Malaya, her father, Dr Pike, who is one of the few to foresee the racial holocaust to come, and the man Clarice loves, her cousin's husband Vic Warren, unemployed London shipwright, who has suppressed his intelligence and true feelings for an ideal of duty. When Dr Pike brings Clarice back from Malaya in 1939, the old England is falling apart. Vic is imprisoned then called up, Clarice is raped, Jack, Vic's son, gets a new 'father' in the form of gangster Tony Rice, and is sent to an oppressive boarding school from which he escapes. Will the three main characters be able to make a future from chaos and upheaval? Derek Beaven thrusts the reader into the sights and sounds of the period with an assured, sensuous prose. He evokes unusual locations, such as Vic and Clarice's refuge, the 'cabin' in rural Essex, and takes us into the heat of battle. He shows us the secret history of the Home Front, the casual racism of an empire not yet scattered, the black market, the criminal underworld, the prevalence of rape and violence against women. He meditates on masculinity and the psychology which makes men both violent and self-destructive, and on history, which may be '...a fable of desire, a romance, an illusion'. Finally he suggests that, despite the barriers of gender and class, post-war England was a place where these outsiders might finally discover a new version of home. This is an involving, subtle and morally complex novel, and at the same time an excellent read. (Kirkus UK)

'Offers reminders of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair ...[A] powerful, sharply conceived novel.' The Times 'The novel's chief strength derives from a psychological delicacy: a file of scrupulously observed temperaments, ground down by circumstance, expressing themselves in dialogue pitched just on the right side of fracture. Beaven excels, too, in descriptions of physical sensation...All the abilities shown in his excellent second novel, Acts of Mutiny , are well to the fore.' D.J. Taylor, Independent 'This is the kind of fiction we like...Beaven imagines the war background so completely that you almost forget what actually happened...[he] shows it as clear as a Vermeer mirror.' David Robertson, Scotsman 'Large, deft, prickly and ambitious. Beaven weaves a highly convincing and alarming picture of a country sinking into a state of war. You believe in everything Beaven tells you because his work practically explodes with narrative assurance.' Julie Myerson, Guardian

Author Information

Derek Beaven is the author of three novels: Newton’s Niece was published in 1994, Acts of Mutiny in 1998, If the Invader Comes in 2001 and His Coldest Winter (2005). Newton’s Niece was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild Best Fiction Book of 1994, and won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for a first novel (Eurasia) 1994/5. Acts of Mutiny was shortlisted for both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Encore Award. If the Invader Comes was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Derek Beaven lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

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