Book review: The Redeemed, by Tim Pears

With The Redeemed Tim Pears brings his remarkable West Country trilogy to a triumphant conclusion. All the novels have been daring, this last perhaps most of all, for it strikes off in new unexpected directions, taking the young hero Leo Sercombe away from rural England and the horses with which he has such affinity, and thrusting him first into the Great War as a boy seaman in the Royal Navy, engaged, and almost losing his life, in the Battle of Jutland; then, post-war, having trained as a diver, working on salvaging a scuttled German ship in Scapa Flow. This is bold, because Pears risks alienating readers who have been delighted by his varied treatment of country life in The Horseman and The Wanderers. He gets away with it because it is so well done that even those readers most eager to get back to the story of Leo and his childhood friend Lottie Prideaux, daughter of his father’s employer, are likely to be held spellbound.