Anthony Quayle (1913–1989)

"I thought this was going to be a straightforward job of fighting," one of author Anthony Quayle's characters says on page 180, in the same sequence of dialogue that gives his novel Eight Hours from England its title. But even though this story takes place behind enemy lines in occupied Albania in 1943, there's no action in the book. Disillusionment is the main theme; "instead of adventure," Quayle's protagonist muses on page 208, "there had been only a long tale of effort, and discomfort".

The reason for the lack of direct, attention-grabbing action between British commandos, Albanian partisans and German soldiers is that Eight Hours from England is more memoir than novel. Quayle, later a famous actor perhaps best known to the target audience of this book for his role in The Guns of Navarone, had the very job within the SOE that he gives his protagonist here: to infiltrate Nazi-occupied Albania and co-ordinate the resistance movement there to ensure it's in line with the British war effort. Hewing very, very close to Quayle's own experiences – he even gives his protagonist, John Overton, his mother's maiden name – Eight Hours from England is restricted from some of the more thrilling avenues it might have pursued in the name of fiction and imagination. An early reference to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (pg. 29), which had a similar scenario of an English-speaking man employed on partisan duty in a foreign land, only shows these limitations more starkly.

That said, if you accept Eight Hours from England as a war memoir rather than a novel, its qualities become much more evident. Quayle/Overton has a damned hard time negotiating with the various resistance groups in his littoral corner of Albania, and we witness a more nuanced take on resistance operations during the war than the usual depiction of co-ordinated patriots desperate to kill Nazis and sabotage rail lines. Quayle's Albanians need coaxing, bribing, flattering, and all of the other natural things that get airbrushed out of the historical record, and while his protagonist's need to politick and "haggle with a lying shepherd over the price of a goat" (pg. 210) is less stimulating than emptying a tommy-gun, Where Eagles Dare-like, in the direction of a German patrol, it is more realistic. Frustration and disappointment might be unusual choices for a writer to seek to evoke in the story they tell, but Quayle gives a valuable record of what the war was really like for people in such circumstances.… (mais)