Chatto £12 pp210

This first novel by a 67-year-old former professor of classics at Columbia University arrives garlanded with praise from Norman Mailer, Shirley Hazzard and Frank McCourt. Its British publisher declares that it is “A Classic in the Making”, which is laying far too much on this perfectly decent but seriously flawed little book.

The novel’s title refers to a list drawn up by Robert McIver, a retired military historian and rugby international, and what McIver is waiting for is death. Terminally ill, mourning his recently deceased wife, he huddles inside their snowbound country retreat as supplies of food and fuel run low. The rules, gradually broken, include keeping himself clean, eating regularly and doing some writing. He once wrote a book about the use and effects of gas in the first world war, and he now starts to work on a short story set on the Western Front. As this story unfolds, it is interspersed with a description of McIver’s physical disintegration (mirrored by that of the house) and recollections of his own past. We learn about his childhood in rural Scotland; the death of his pilot father in the first world war; his relations with his wife, a painter he met in New York; the naval action he saw in the second world war; and the death of his son from wounds received in Vietnam.

When limbering up to begin his war story, McIver writes: “I said to my soul, Be still, and watch the small trickling beginnings ease towards flood. Let the story declare itself, and the characters and events take me down among them and draw the words out of me. I have tried to possess my soul in patience, I have gathered all the hungers of my past in readiness, to spell out the missing syllables of my life.”

Thankfully, once McIver gets going, he reins in this tendency towards portentousness. Peter Pouncey is less restrained, and echoes of T S Eliot, the Bible, Blake and Milton sound throughout the book.

The story set in the trenches is involving enough, but it contains some worryingly false notes and unconvincing details: the grand guignol sergeant who grows and files his fingernails to be used as auxiliary weapons; the officer who addresses a private by his first name, and who suggests that something is “definitely not my scene”; the amateur painter in the ranks who goes to an estaminet frequented by the Artists’ Rifles to hobnob with David Jones (who did not, in fact, serve in that regiment) and show his pictures to an envious Paul Nash.

Pouncey is at his considerable best when writing in a sparse and elegant prose about the natural world, notably in the opening pages of the novel, describing the house and its surroundings in happier days, and in a magical re-creation of boating on the Norfolk Broads in the early 20th century. There is also a vivid and moving passage about a naval bombardment, which concludes with a burial at sea.

Less convincing are the passages, particularly towards the end of the book, in which grandiloquent exegesis takes over from exact observation of the physical world. Having completed his story, McIver dwells at some length on its meaning and significance, rather as he laboriously and somewhat embarrassingly analyses every piece of music he listens to.

Like McIver beginning his war story, Pouncey is too eager to “spell out the missing syllables”. His novel is overly self-conscious, unable to resist drawing attention to its own literary and narrative devices. There is a world of difference between “a classic” and something that aspires to being merely “classy”.

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