Follow Me Home
Given the recent popularity of books about operations in Iraq and Afghanistan it feels surprising that we have waited this long for a novel set amid the ambushes and acronyms of those two conflicts. The staple of the non-fiction military history and memoir to date has been the hectic ferocity of the all-too-frequent TiCs - the now commonplace Americanism for an old-fashioned firefight: "Troops in Contact". With Patrick Bishop's fictional offering we have, perhaps, the confirmation of a new genre: the pinot grigio, high-heels and affairs of chick-lit are replaced by the SA80s, body-armour and heroics of TiC-lit.
Follow Me Home does the details and the heroics well. It is a good, easy read and is impressively authentic. The author knows his subject, British infantry soldiers and their fight in Helmand, very well and his instinctive understanding of the military should satisfy even those harshest of critics, the very men and women who have served in Afghanistan.
Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero casts a long literary shadow. Arguments about differing sides of the same story and apportioning blame aside, it set a standard and whetted the appetite for explosive stories of military endurance and bravery. Little has changed in 20 years; something inevitably goes wrong (in Army-speak "no plan survives contact"), survivors must fight their way home, relationships are strained, we should expect the unexpected, someone won't make it but British pluck will win out etc. It is to Bishop's credit that he makes the formula work in Follow Me Home, but with no "true story" tag to support it, the characterisation sometimes feels thin.
It is also appropriate that Bishop's narrator spends a lot of time day-dreaming; it would require an energetic imagination to contrive coincidences which come thick and fast at times in order to explore some of the themes Bishop rightly wishes to weave into his story. Certain readers will be perturbed at the ambivalence with which Bishop's young Toms engage with the conflict before them - Afghans are, pointedly, "them" throughout and the culturally sensitive and sympathetic patrol member is, to his peers, something of an oddity - but this is an honest portrayal of the political disengagement with which most soldiers do their difficult jobs. There are attempts to draw insightful comparison between what motivates our own "heroic" young soldiers and their "terrorist" jihadi counterparts - so different and yet apparently so similar - but these are difficult to reconcile with the pace and length of the book, which rattles along.
Insofar as any book about a troubling, complex, bloody and contemporary conflict can be entertaining, this one is. Follow Me Home is no For Whom the Bell Tolls, but neither do I think Bishop intends it to be. It is a TiC-Lit yarn in which the swash and buckle of old has been replaced with the crack and thump of sniper rifle and the dull thud of RPGs. Expect a jolly good film to follow soon.
Patrick Hennessey is the author of The Junior Officers' Reading Club (Allen Lane)
