Changes

|title=Motherland

|author=William Nicholson

|reviewer=Robin Leggett

|publisher=Quercus

|date=February 2013

|website=http://www.williamnicholson.com/

|summary=A love triangle mainly set in 1940s and 1950s England concentrating on the emotional impact of the War on both those who went and those who were left behind. There's also a fairly strong Catholic faith element to this story - expect guilt and repression as well as love and loyalty.

}}

William Nicholson's ''Motherland'' starts and concludes in the present day with Alice Dickinson travelling to France to meet her recently discovered grandmother, but the huge majority of the book concerns a love triangle between Kitty, Alice's great grandmother, an army driver in Sussex in 1942, Ed, a Royal Marine commando and his school friend Larry, a liaison officer with Combined Ops. The story spans the war, particularly Mountbatten's disastrous raid on Dieppe, and the post war years as Ed and Larry seek to overcome their war time experiences and the impact of these on Kitty and her relationship with these two men and how they relate to other people, particularly women.

While it might not be my favourite of Nicholson's books to date, he is always highly readable and tells a good story with interesting insight into human traits. Here he gets to play with love, loyalty, betrayal, faith and doubt. Every now and then, he also offers up a thought of a view that is a new way to look at things even though for much of the book he's dealing with fairly well trodden situations. For me though, there was just too much of a gap between the experiences of Kitty and the impact on Pamela, (Alice's grandmother) and therefore on Alice herself. It's this ''mise en scene'' aspect that ultimately had me yearning for more connection to the main narrative. For all that, the story is addictive and for the most part enthralling though.

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