Stuart Evers

Story of a long-lasting friendship between two men, Drummond Moore and James Carter, who meet during their military service. They bond over shared experiences at Doom Town, a civil defense center that simulates situations related to nuclear war. They are from different classes and backgrounds. Drum works in a Ford factory near London. Carter is a wealthy landowner in northwest England. We follow their long-lasting friendship, relationships, marriages, and children from the late 1950s to the show more 2010s.

The plot is structured around worldwide events that induce fear, showing that just as one subsides, another takes over. The international events remain in the background, with the focus on the characters and their reactions. Evers brings fear down to the individual level. Carter and Drum plan to set up a bunker and stock it with end-of-civilization supplies. One of Drum’s primary motivations is keeping his family safe.

It is a slowly developing narrative. I enjoyed the literary writing style. The dialogue is particularly effective, though the prose is choppy in places. I appreciated the fictional news articles, inserted sporadically, that provide context for worldwide incidents and illuminate the characters’ stories from another perspective.

The premise of this book caught my attention. Evers examines fear, how it can permeate decisions, and the resulting harm to those we seek to protect. It seems like a pertinent topic for our times.

I received an advance reader’s copy from the publisher via NetGalley. show less

Drummond Moore and James Carter met in the late 1950s whilst doing their two years’ National Service. An early encounter, when Drum saves Carter from losing money in a card game, marks the beginning of what will become a life-long friendship although, on the face of it, they have absolutely nothing in common, either in terms of background or personality. Drum is a rather shy, self-effacing young man from a Labour-voting, working-class family who, prior conscription in 1957, had spent two show more years at the Ford factory in Dagenham. Carter is from a wealthy, well-connected background but, having just been sent down from Oxford, his father has insisted he should now do his National Service. However, keen not to be sent to the various areas of conflict his fellow conscripts are being posted to, he gets his father to pull strings and arrange for him to serve his time in the Catering Corps and, as a way of repaying Drum, ensures that he is included in this safe billet. They spend the final three months of their service at ‘Doom Town’, a mock-up of a town devastated by a nuclear bomb and used to train troops on how to support the Civil Defence Corps following such a catastrophic strike. It’s an experience which not only haunts both men but will influence their behaviour, and relationships, for the rest of their lives.
Following de-mob Drum marries Gwen, a barmaid he met in Cumbria and returns Dagenham to work at the strike-ridden Ford factory, whilst Carter returns to his life of economic security and privilege, marries Daphne and lives in the family home in the north. Each of the couples goes on to have two children. Although contact is maintained, their lives follow these very different paths for the next twelve years until, in 1971, Carter encourages Drum to move his family north, buy the farm next door to him (to prevent the land being sold to a developer) and become a farmer. From that point on the lives of the two families become more complexly entwined.
By the end of the short first chapter, set in 2019 and introducing the reader to Nate and Anneka (Drum and Gwen’s adult children), it’s clear that not only have the siblings been estranged for forty years, but that something
life-changing has now happened to reunite them. The timeline then switches to 1959, when Drum and Carter are completing their National Service at ‘Doom Town’, with the ensuing almost five hundred pages being devoted to a decade-by-decade exploration of their friendship, their relationships with their wives and their children, gradually building a multi-layered account of the events, both major and minor, which have influenced their decision-making and shaped their lives over a sixty-year period.
Told mainly from the perspectives of Drum, Gwen, and later Anneka and Nate, this hugely ambitious and engaging story managed to combine the intensity of the intimate, complex relationships between the various characters with evocative portrayals of the external events which were influencing their lives. I was impressed by the convincing way in which the author captured how the co-dependency of the unlikely, unbalanced and frequently toxic nature of the relationship between Drum and Carter was forged during their shared experiences of National Service and ‘Doom City’. How the promises made then, and honed over the years as each of them held the other to account, could never quite be broken, even when reneging on them was a clear temptation. Their relationship was central not only to how the story developed, but to the shifting dynamics between the two families over the decades, especially the relationship between the two wives. I found all the characters totally convincing, with each providing an essential ‘key’ to the veracity of the unfolding story – although it’s hard to give examples of this without revealing information which needs to be discovered incrementally!
The impact on both men of the time spent at ‘Doom City’, and the military exercises dealing with the mocked-up aftermath of a post-nuclear attack, has a lasting effect. However, Drum’s obsessive fear about the possibility of a nuclear war and whether he’d be able to protect his family, not only seriously affects his own mental health but inflicts a different sort of damage on his relationships with his wife and his children. In the following six decades there are numerous examples of threats to national and global security (eg, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, IRA bombing campaigns, 9/11, terrorist attacks, suicide bombers etc) which provide fuel to feed his fears and, even when he’s able to intellectually recognise that his behaviour is dysfunctional, damaging to himself and to the people he loves, he’s unable to prevent himself from catastrophizing. I found the psychological integrity of the author’s depiction of how this crippling anxiety affected Drum, and those around him, very impressive.
Having lived through each of the decades this story covered, one of the reasons this was such an engrossing and thought-provoking story to read was because the author made such effective use of his research to distil an authentic ‘essence’ of each one. References to books, music, television programmes etc were interwoven with the major political and social changes which took place during this period of recent history, meaning that throughout my reading I felt thrust back into each era, able to recognise, and identify with, many of the issues the characters were struggling with … as a child growing up in the 50s, I had nightmares following training exercises at school about ‘what to do in the event of a nuclear war …’!
I think one of the reasons I could hardly bear to put this 533-page novel down was because of the author’s wonderful use of language to evoke not only a convincing sense of time and place, but to enable me to understand his characters in what felt like a very intimate way. One of the ways in which he did this was by allowing me to become privy to their inner reflections through their streams of consciousness as they explored different ideas, scenarios, consequences etc. Ignoring conventional rules of syntax, these disjointed ‘meanderings’ were often quite short, but I found they added layers of depth to each of the main characters, enabling me to ‘hear’ their distinctive voices. However, much as I enjoyed them, I suspect that some readers would be irritated by these sections!
In many ways this is a dark and disturbing story but it’s not one which is without moments of humour and glimmers of light, and I have no hesitation in recommending it to readers who appreciate complex, multi-layered, and thought-provoking novels.
With my thanks to the publisher and Readers First for my copy in exchange for an honest review. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Definitely the most interesting thing about Stuart Evers' new novel If This Is Home is the ultra-rich Las Vegas condo complex Valhalla where our narrator is working as the book opens, a great symbol for everything wrong with America right now: a glittering house of cards designed expressly to fleece show more the empty consumerist one-percenters out of their money, prospective buyers are shuttled around to what they are told are the "most exclusive" clubs and restaurants of the complex during their weekend hard-sell tour, not realizing that the other locked rooms they are passing are in fact completely empty; and are given a complex set of rules they're admonished to follow but that are never actually enforced, in order to let these people feel like they're getting away with something they shouldn't because of their wealth and status.

In fact, it often feels like it was Valhalla that Evers first envisioned when starting to work on this novel, and only afterwards filled in a hasty, cliche-filled three-act narrative to justify the book's existence, a shame given how strong the Las Vegas parts are. The story of British expat Mark Wilkinson, who has transformed himself into the cooler, more sociopathic alter-ego Joe Novak in America, the book's structure is basically broken up into three parts -- we mostly stay at Valhalla for the first half, until a "shocking act of violence" (according to the dust-jacket synopsis), which in fact is not actually that shocking at all*, inspires him to go back to his small British hometown for the first time in a decade, where we spend the second half of the novel; then weaving in and out of both these halves is a flashback look at the young-love relationship he used to be in, and whose tragic ending is what convinced him to flee to the US in the first place.

[*And seriously, when you set up a place like Valhalla like the owners have, heavily touted to its billionaire customers as a place where "every desire imaginable is accommodated," I don't know why it would come as a shock when one of them ends up beating up a prostitute; in fact, I would just assume that the first question out of the mouth of every asshole who shows up is, "Say, when do I get to kill a hooker?"]

Like I said, the first half is interesting enough, presenting us with a fully fleshed-out bacchanalian nightmare and letting us glimpse the boring behind-the-scenes grunt work that makes it happen, and teasing us with a backstory about a past girlfriend who had something bad happen to her, even though we don't know what, why, or by whom. But the entire second half of the book unfortunately just kind of falls apart, with Evers seemingly not knowing what to do with the story and so falling back on the most hacky tropes possible; Mark spends literally 150 pages wandering around his old hometown doing nothing in particular, with all his old acquaintances and family members disproportionally furious at him merely for leaving 13 years ago and not dropping anyone a postcard (instead they all react to his re-appearance with the kind of anger you would expect if he had actually killed the woman), and eventually with Mark hallucinating the ghost of his ex-girlfriend following him around, being smartass and challenging to him as a way of pushing him into the family confrontations he came there to have, about the most tired cliche you can even evoke in a murder-mystery thriller.

Most disturbingly of all, though, what is teased throughout the book as a "big reveal" about Mark's girlfriend's tragic end turns out to not be a big reveal at all, a plot development I'll let remain a surprise but that I can assure you has not even the tiniest bit to do with the entire rest of the novel; and in fact this horrific act of violence against her seems to only exist in the first place so that Mark himself can go through an emotional journey of self-discovery afterward, a plain and clear example of the "Women in Refrigerators" phenomenon that's been (rightly) receiving so much critical protest in the last few years. That's a disappointing way to end a novel that started with so much promise; and it's a shame that Evers could never come up with other things as clever and well-thought-out as Valhalla to fill the rest of this noble but often deeply flawed story. It comes with only a limited recommendation today because of that, a book that some will like more than me, but that most people will be generally disappointed by.

Out of 10: 6.9 show less

I must declare an interest here - the only reason I picked up this book in the first place is because the author is a friend of my cousin. It was particularly nice to read the acknowledgements at the back and see my cousin's name (plus my former boss, but we won't mention that!)

Having said that, I felt that the short stories within this book were well-written and enthralling. Evers tried several different styles of writing, most notably playing with the person-narrative - in one case using show more the 2nd-person.Obviously, some stories were stronger than others, but as a whole, the set worked well. All of them dealt with people who weren't completely happy with their lives, and the "smoking" element reflected that well. The theme of smoking was clear, but not too heavy-handed and it didn't feel like a massive beacon shouting 'Look, here's the smoking part'. It just gave the stories a bit of an artistic connection which I appreciated.

I don't always get on with short stories as I feel that just as you've become invested in the characters, the story ends and you have to get to grips with a whole new cast, but this book worked. I did sort-of subside at the end of each individual story, but got back on the wagon shortly after!

Pleasantly surprised. show less