House of the Dead
Reading The War Tour is like wandering through a network of underground catacombs, a labyrinth of the unexpected, full of marvellous and terrible things but always the crunch of mortars and the clatter of small arms fire from some ceaseless battle that rages itself out on a distant surface. Tutsi child soldiers and British army wives mingle with the real-life Roxa Luxemberg and Niels Bohr. Lambert draws them all with the same imaginative sympathy and exactitude. A Carolina recruit is subject to routine punishment: ‘They’d spray him in the face with a hosepipe while all the others ran up to him and thumped him in the stomach.’ A child under siege in Sarajevo looks forward to a meal without nettles.
Max Dunbar reviews Zoe Lambert‘s The War Tour.