By Scott Andrews

Review by Charles Ellis

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Lee Kegan has travelled to Iraq to find his missing father, and finds himself stuck in the middle of a vicious conflict between the locals and an occupying force. Jane the Matron is trying to keep St Mark’s School together and rescue as many kids as possible, and try to do it without killing people. There’s an enemy force preparing to seize England by force of arms, and the mysterious Operation Motherland gathering steam.

And there’s also a lot of killing and maiming!

Scott Andrews’ last book School’s Out, to which this is a sequel to, was a favourite of mine thanks to the uncompromising brutality and moral issues. There was no simple and easy way out of the bleakness that Andrews dropped Lee into; by the end, he was haunted by the realisation that every time he tried to avoid bloodshed more people died. Could this book, dealing with the mysterious British Army’s Operation Motherland from the first book, match up to that?

The good news is that yes it can. By splitting the book between Lee and Jane’s points of view, it also gets to further delve into its issues. The characters are haunted by different demons, have different motives and backgrounds that drive them, and their differing ages and roles cause them to differ. And while Lee is no longer avoiding bloodshed and instead is sickened by the realisation that he may actually like it, Jane is utterly determined to ensure, as a doctor, she’ll get no one killed. Unfortunately, in Andrews’ world, things don’t work that way…

That’s another strength of this book: the complete unpredictability of how people will react, how situations will go down, and who will die. The ending, annoyingly, is quite predictable (more so than School’s Out) but the route it took to get there is anything but. Characters who should be on the same side fail to ally themselves; unexpected crises come out of nowhere. And characters you think will be major players, who have too much dramatic potential and are being written too much to buy it? They can buy it, or get crippled, or anything. It’s a whole book full of Orlok-shoots-Giant moments.

This isn’t restricted to the supporting cast, either – Lee is not a superhuman soldier, he can take damage. And he does. By the end of the book, he’s a bit of a mess. In fact, everyone gets to be a mess, both physically and psychologically. Andrews wants to show the horrors of war and violence, and a running theme is the pressures and hell that comes from being a soldier. He gets it across pretty damn well – a notable moment is when Lee realises how good a killer his father is, and how he’s never really known him. He especially goes out of his way to de-glamorise where possible; when Andrews’ heroes get tortured, they break (another stand-out scene).

Operation Motherland does have its downsides though, not least that the Operation itself comes off as a secondary plot that gets overtaken. The book has a larger, international scale than School’s Out – what’s happened in post-Cull Iraq is quite interesting – but on a shorter timescale, and it’s never as detailed as St Mark’s and Kent’s countryside in its predecessor. The short timescale also undermines the force of Operation Motherland and makes Lee’s ordeals slightly less horrible than his months-long battle for St Mark’s. In fact the school itself, for the most part, is absent, and that’s a shame as it was a unique setting that made the first book stand out. No school also means less of the cast from the last book, giving us far less of the rather interesting character of Green. And depressingly, the sinister General Blythe makes for a good villain but never as good as the monstrous Mac from the first book. We see less of what’s driving him and what he’s thinking, and this gives him less presence. On top of which, a sadistic and murderous general will have less of an impact than a sadistic and murderous schoolboy – of course a general’s a baddie!

That said, Operation Motherland has more going for it than against it. The bleakness, the honestly shocking violence and moral ambiguity, and the unpredictable plot all make this a book worth reading. The characters, even minor ones, get fleshed out to some extent and have nice moments; we also get to see Jane’s past fleshed out, and an interesting past it is; and Lee’s growing darkness is engrossing, especially with the “ghost” of Mac whispering in his ear. There’s also an admirable attempt to tighten up the Afterblight Chronicles line with a nod to the plot of Paul Kane’s Afterblight books. In this book, stuff has happened “off screen” and continues to happen, Lee and Jane are just two people in a larger, frightening world with no easy answers.

And if that doesn’t sell you, a whole load of people get impaled!

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