The Redeemed

May 15, 2019
Battle, its aftermath, and the dawning of a new era shape the third episode of Pears' (The Wanderers, 2018, etc.) epic tale of love--love for the land and between two long-separated souls. The pace rarely quickens in this deliberate concluding volume of Pears' trilogy of early-20th-century life, set in England's West Country during the transition from old farming and landscape traditions, through war, into the mechanical age. Nevertheless, separate moments of intense drama mold the lives of both landowner's daughter Lottie Prideaux and carter's son Leo Sercombe, who was cast out by his family years earlier. Like Ulysses, Leo has journeyed through multiple landscapes and perils before returning to the estate. As the novel opens he's a boy seaman in World War I, aboard HMS Queen Mary and about to enter the Battle of Jutland, which will see the death of nearly the entire crew, more than a thousand men and boys. Leo survives to become a deep sea diver, spending the postwar years helping salvage the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow and earning the money to buy himself "a field. A horse. A home." Lottie, meanwhile, is pursuing an interest in animal care and will become one of the first women to train as a vet. The stage is long set for the reunion of this pair whose class-spanning commitment to each other was made in childhood, but not before Pears once again lays down intensely detailed descriptions of work--in the navy, in the salvage business, in stables, fields, and barns--across the years. "Time proceeds along its ever-onward spiral. We join it for a moment," he observes, and in due course Leo and Lottie will converge. This book is less a climax, more the return of the native. Pears' achievement is in his fine evocation of an era that's largely been lost and in his attention to the natural world.

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Starred review from June 1, 2019
The concluding volume in Pears' celebrated West Country trilogy (following The Horseman, 2017, and The Wanderers, 2018) again boasts lush descriptions of rural England and subtly penetrating character studies of individuals who say little but feel much. The novel begins with Leo Sercombe, a horseman from the West Country, out of his depth in the Royal Navy during WWI, serving aboard the HMS Queen Mary and, later, becoming a diver hired to help with the salvage of scuttled German ships in a Scottish harbor. Meanwhile, Lottie Prideaux, the daughter of a landowner in Somerset, whose forbidden love for plebeian Leo has not waned over their years apart, has defied gender conventions and become a veterinarian. Yes, this is in large part a love story, and we can't help but crave the reuniting of Leo and Lottie that we know is in the offing, but along the way to that reunion, what drives this moving novel is Pears' striking ability to capture the vivid detail and profound joy of working people doing the work they love?Leo learning to dive and, later (a horseman once more), whispering a mare back to health; Lottie displaying her ability to birth horses and other large animals, despite the distrusting eyes of the males who have no choice but to call on her for help. This richly satisfying conclusion to a wonderful trilogy moves slowly but gracefully, imbued throughout with the poetry of nature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)