We'll Meet Again

Anton Rider #4

by Bartle Bull

Written with what the New York Times has called, "Mr. Bull's spirited, sensuous, hotblooded evocation of a rich and eventful historical world," Bartle Bull's We'll Meet Again is a powerful romantic novel set in Egypt and Jugoslavia during World War II.

It is 1942, and the American and British armies are landing in North Africa to fight the German army led by General Erwin Rommel. Underground resistance to German occupation is rising across Europe. In Jugoslavia, Communist and royalist resistance movements are fighting both the Germans and each other. American and British agents are parachuting into Jugoslavia from Egypt to assist them.

Anton Rider, the safari hunter featured in Bull's celebrated novels The White Rhino Hotel, A Café on the Nile, and The Devil's Oasis, is dispatched to Jugoslavia to kill a brutal fascist commander and attack a Nazi concentration camp where Gypsies and others are being murdered. Raised as a boy by Gypsies in England, Anton is injured while parachuting into the mountains of Jugoslavia with an American agent who becomes his mortal enemy.

Meanwhile, Rider's son is wounded fighting Rommel's forces in North Africa, and Anton's beloved wife, Gwenn, from whom he is separated, is having an affair in Cairo with a treacherous English officer. There the mysterious dwarf Olivio Alavedo is at the center of intrigue and fights to protect his absent friend, Anton Rider.

After romantic and military adventures in Jugoslavia, Anton returns to Egypt, where he confronts his enemies and seeks to recover the lady he loves.

Genres: Historical Fiction

407 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 20, 2022

About the author

Bartle Bull was born in London and educated at Harvard and at Magdalen College, Oxford. A student of the China coast since he first worked in Hong Kong over thirty years ago, he is a member of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club. He is the author of Safari: A chronicle of Adventure and the novels The White Rhino Hotel, A Cafe on the Nile, and The Devil's Oasis.

Reviews

[KOMET · Rating 2 out of 5]

WE'LL MEET AGAIN brings back many of the principal characters from The Devil's Oasis. Yet it is an epic novel that, upon reading it, has 2 parallel stories in which the author seeks to have the reader believe, are set in the same time period. One story is firmly centered on the latter stages of the North African campaign, spanning from the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa in November 1942 to the battles in Tunisia in early 1943 that brought closure to the campaign. The other story concerns Anton Rider and the experiences he had in Yugoslavia, where he had been parachuted in by night with 2 other soldiers to join up with Marshal Tito's partisans in the mountains and support them in their fight against the Germans and their Ustashe allies. Rider's time in Yugoslavia seems to have taken place later in the fall of 1943 after the conclusion of the North African campaign. And yet, the author places both that campaign and Rider's stint in Yugoslavia as taking place concurrently, which doesn't make any sense.

Prior to taking on the assignment in Yugoslavia, the extent of Rider's wounds from his stint with the Long Range Desert Group precluded him from further combat. That was something Rider, by now in his early 40s, did not want to accept. He pestered his superiors for a combat assignment and in that assignment was trained by Alistair Treitel, a British intelligence officer (in his civilian life, Treitel had been a professor of archeology and an Egyptologist). Treitel, a vain, greedy, and insecure man, had made the acquaintance of Rider's estranged wife and was in a relationship with her. He felt himself to be in competition with Rider and once he was in Yugoslavia, sought to ensure that this would be Rider's last mission, from which he would not return.

While We'll Meet Again embodies much of the elements that made the other novels in the series interesting and engaging, the editing in certain sections was shoddy, detracting from the novel's robustness. (There was also the insertion of a character who had been killed off in a previous novel in the series.) Simply put, I didn't enjoy this book as I did the others. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have read it. I will be donating it to my local used bookstore.

[Helene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have read all the Anton Rider books and can’t understand why they haven’t become movies. They certainly have a cast of characters. They’re never advertised….maybe a better publicist? They really are fun reads

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The presumed end of the Anton Rider series (though the finale is excellent, it is not really a full conclusion and the series can be continued), while a novel of war like the previous one, is excellent and on par with the first 2 volumes - this time there is considerably more intrigue and partisan fighting (here in Bosnia rather than East Africa of the first two volumes), while the North African fighting moves to Tunisia and the operation Torch seen through the eyes of Denby this time.

Although the main villain's relation with our heroes (well there are two main villains but one is the mastermind and the other the muscle) is tiresomely repetitive (after Enzo and Giscard one would think that Gwenn develops a better sense for the secrets and lies of smooth intellectual men), that jars a little bit less than in the previous volume. Similarly, Anton's adventures with other (younger) women seem less forced than in the previous volume and the Bosnian part of the book is bleak and brutal but superbly done.

Overall an excellent fourth volume of a series that deserves to be much better known and that I highly recommend.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent WWII story in Northern Africa and Yugoslavia too for a bit. Excellent war stories, private intrigue and wartime characters and romance.