Tank!: 40 Hours of Battle, August 1944

This densely-written and unassuming but surprisingly impressive gem of a novel follows a British tank crew through a single battle in Normandy in 1944, providing a comprehensive and atmospheric recreation of the typical tanker experience. It is a veritable smorgasbord of competing sights and sounds and emotions, as author Ken Tout – who fought in the battle himself, and the book is a sort of pseudo-fiction or 'faction' – draws on every ounce of his talent. Not only are we given an insight into the soldier's "kaleidoscopic torrent of thought" in the heat of battle, as the Introduction puts it, but we are given authentic British Tommies engaging in banter and black humour. It is almost documentary in its approach.

If there is one show more partial drawback to this hidden gem of a book, it is that it lacks some balance and restraint. Tout is a better poet than he is a storyteller: there are many evocative lines and powerful passages but they often crowd out the plot, sometimes quite clumsily. Tout says on page 202 that noted war poet Siegfried Sassoon's books "are my manuals of war", and this shows in his attempts to outdo each of his previous lines. I have to say, it works – this review does not intend to criticise Tout's poetry and quality of prose – but it lacks restraint. Overdoing finesse is, in its way, the same as lacking finesse and, as much as I enjoyed each little passage on its own, as part of the whole I frequently found myself hoping Tout would grip the reins a bit tighter. Tout exploits the poetic potential of everything that happens before, in and after the battle, but there is often nothing left over afterwards. It's a strip-mining approach to literature.

The deluge of (admittedly impressive) poetry is like a human body quickly putting on a lot of muscle: the bones and the frame aren't ready for it. This is exacerbated by the condensed timeframe (the battle is about forty hours, as the subtitle of the book says) which means that pacing would be an inevitable problem anyway. Tout's admirable commitment to authenticity also means that it can be hard to follow the combat and the tank's manoeuvres, due to the abundance of call-signs and code words. Consequently, some of the drama is lost. Nevertheless, Tank! is an impressive book about a forgotten battle: a side of the war not often told and never with such eloquence. Sometimes awkward, but more often inspired, Tank! is a book to treat fondly. show less