While the book quickly jumps to 1946 and later to 1998, the repercussions continue throughout from this soldier’s death at the hands of his own side, although a full understanding of just how these repercussions play out does not come until the very end of the book. Rather than a plot-driven page-turner, The Small Book is primarily a book of ideas arising from this extraordinarily disturbing event with all its implications for the men who were forced to shoot, the man shot, for the family left behind, for the country that chose to condemn its soldier.
Characters give life to The Small Book through the distinctive voices Rohan creates for the multiple narrators. The clear delineation of narrative voices is perhaps Rohan’s most impressive accomplishment. There is no mistaking Pam for Roy, even if the narrative shifts weren’t labeled, and as the book leaps through the stages of the narrators’ lives, so their voices age distinctly and appropriately. Rohan has done a good job of using these voices to reveal the effects of the execution over time. So, for example, Pam, the first major narrator we hear, is locked into a fierce and unquestioning loyalty to the Communist Party in England because of her father’s war experience, and it colors her way of seeing life and her choice of language: “And that was all down to Father, who’d signed up to the Party as soon as it was launched because of the way they’d executed the deserters—well, that’s what they called them—in the First War. First he had the nightmares from having to do it, then he joined the Party. Better to be doing things than having nightmares is what Father always used to say.” Her father was sure the convictions were all to do with class and there’d been an injustice. He imbues his daughter with this sensibility, and it becomes her guiding principle, even to the exclusion of other ways of looking at or for life. There are times when Pam’s limitations grate, but that is the point, I think. The multiple voices provide the needed lenses to unravel both the “what happened” and the “what does it mean.” This is a thinking book.
You will be intrigued with the complex web of events and relationships that is gradually revealed over the course of the book, and the ways in which one historical moment can shape such seemingly unrelated issues as how someone will or will not find lasting love, how children will develop into adults, how the rhythms of daily life will fall into place.