Customer Reviews

A War on two fronts - By: Walter Ellis, 14 Nov 2008
Patrick Bishop's first foray into fiction was a long time coming. But it proves worth the wait. A Good War tells the story of Polish flyer Adam Tomaszewski, who, having been forced to flee his homeland, continues the war as an RAF fighter pilot - one of The Few. As the story opens, the Battle of Britain is getting underway above the fields & villages of Kent & Sussex & over the English Channel, swarming with enemy aircraft. Tomaszewski, though a gifted pilot, is a sensitive soul who evenin the heat of battle finds it hard to forget the emotional turmoil created by his friend Gerry Cunningham, an Army officer from Ireland, & Moira, a cynical, yet ultimately vulnerable young woman with a fickle heart, for whom war is the ultimate aphrodysiac. Tomaszewski loves Moira. But though Moira returns his affection, she is more movedin the end by the swagger of Cunningham, a veteran of Dunkirk - one of those insufferable rogues whom we sufferin the end because we seein him a self-confidence & ruthlessness we wish we could summonin ourselves. Sultry & precocious, Moira is torn between her best & worst impulses, giving her body to both men, waiting to see which of them will emerge as the more attractive prize. Meanwhile,in the skies above England, Göring's Luftwaffe is unrelentingin its fury, & it isin his narration of this sublime conflict that Bishop - an award-winning war correspondent & expertin the period - achieves his own finest hour. Tomaszewski is shot down not once, but twice, transforming himself into an air ace even as his friends, one by one, diein the struggle. Cunningham, conscious of his friend's nobility & anxious for combat, determines to prove himselfin the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, &in the years that follow earns a reputation as one of Britain's most effective behind-the-lines fighters. But fate brings the two men together again, firstin the desert outside Cairo, then, after a transport aircraft piloted by Tomaszewski is blasted out of the sky,in occupied France on the eve of D-Day. In Vichy they have a job to do. They are to cause havoc behind the enemy's supply lines on the road to Normandy. But neither man can forget what has passed between them. As the Axis forces roll north, Tomaszewski finds a new love within the ranks of the French Resistance. Cunningham, jealous & contemptuous by turns, thrusts the two young lovers into the heart of the action, then prepares to make his own final stand. Not everyone will survive the last encounter, but I guarantee that, as a reader, you will not fail to get to the final page.