Sergeant Arthur Bowman, a sergeant in the East India Company, is sent on a secret mission during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. But the expedition is foiled – his men are captured and tortured. Throughout their ordeal, a single word becomes Bowman’s mantra, a word that will stiffen their powers of endurance in the face of unimaginable suffering: “Survival”. But for all that, only a handful escape with their lives. Some years later in London, battling his ghosts through a haze of alcohol and opium, Bowman discovers a mutilated corpse in a sewer. The victim appears to have been subjected to the same torments as Bowman endured in the Burmese jungle. And the word “Survival” has been daubed in blood by the body’s side. Persuaded that the culprit is one of the men who shared his captivity, Bowman resolves to hunt him down.
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Retribution Road
Antonin Varenne,
Retribution Road starts by throwing you straight into the thick of the Burmese War. It’s fragmented, and confusing (especially if you’re not good at history!) but similar to an action movie you want to see how this pans out.
Fortunately, we then skip ahead years later when Bowman and co are saved from captivity and are all trying to survive the best they can. This turns into less of an action film and more of a reflection on the aftermath of war. Survivors are thrown to the dogs back in England as they have to find their role in society alongside the often crippling PTSD. These fights for survival through the simplest of tasks were some of the most interesting parts of the book for me.
With 10 survivors comes multiple ways in how they have coped. Bowman leans on alcohol, Peavish turns to God and Penders goes travelling. Some don’t make it and some are going stir crazy as they can’t live a full live afterwards. This is well written, and it’s hammered home that this is because of the awful war horrors they lived through.
There’s some pages which are so overwhelmingly described that I can imagine what it was like back then in London. When there’s no rain and the heat is pelting down on the sewage ridden streets, it would have been awful for our characters who were trying to forget India. This carries on as Bowman, our main character travels miles away in chase of who’s killing people.
As you can see, it’s taken me a few paragraphs to even get to Bowmans introduction in this review. This is purposeful because I don’t really find Bowman to be the important part of the book. Bowman is there to showcase a certain reaction to PTSD in alcoholism and to take us to visit the other survivors. But as a character, Bowman isn’t all that great. I didn’t really feel anything for him as a character, and this was similar across all the characters we met.
It’s also extremely hard for me to care for him as he’s so racist. Of course, this is because in the time period, racism is accepted and every white man would behave similarly. But reading back into that time period or not, I disliked the way POC characters, especially Asian characters were described and it pulled me away from the book a little bit.
To make up for the disapointing main character though, the book has a complex and well thought out plot. Until the very end I was being surprised by new information that comes about.
There’s a fantastic whodunnit kind of murder mystery that Bowman follows across the globe. There’s red herrings, surprise visitors and a wonderful conclusion that you don’t see coming at all.
POSITIVES
+ Fantastic plotline
+ War PTSD representation
+ Complex ideas translate to page well
NEGATIVES
– Racism put me off slightly
– Characters could have been more
I received Retribution Road by Antonin Varenne from the publisher. This is an unbiased and honest review