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)
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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