Cold Snap

by Francis King

For innumerable people in Great Britain, the second half of the forties was a period of return to homes and former occupations after the volcanic dislocations of the war. Michael, having repeatedly risked his life as an Air Force pilot, is now back in his comfortable and privileged existence as a fellow of a major Oxford college. After the excitements of her years in SOE, the Special Operations Executive, his cousin Christine is attempting to fulfill her high expectations of her as a classical scholar of note. For the German prisoners crowded together in a camp on the outskirts of the town there have been no such returns. But at least the previously severe edict against any sort of fraternisation has been in some measure relaxed. So it is that a chance conversation that Michael initiates with a solitary prisoner, Thomas, precipitates a friendship between the fastidious don and a little group of prisoners, whom he eventually introduces to Christine. Soon Michael has become profoundly attached to Klaus, a previously robust East Prussian hideously wounded before his capture, who remains totally unaware of the dormant passion that he has aroused. Christine starts a tumultuous affair with Thomas, a would-be composer. Inevitably the relationship is a difficult one in a world in which many of the victors oppose relationships of any kind with representatives of the hated enemy. King''s descriptions of the grimness of the lives of Germans, labouring outdoors in the bitter cold, and o

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Francis Henry King, CBE, was a British novelist, poet and short story writer.

He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland, brought up in India and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land. After completing his degree in 1949 he worked for the British Council; he was posted around Europe, and then in Kyoto. He resigned to write full time in 1964.

He was a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down

King's final novel, his 32nd, published in 2009, two years prior to his death at 88. The 23rd of his books for me to read.

This is the King novel I've rated the lowest, which is a shame, that he didn't go out in a finer blaze of glory; more with a whimper, than a bang.

Here, King returns to the years of his most illustrious books, the years immediately following WW2, and tells the story of Christine, a young Oxford graduate student, who suddenly and rather inexplicably falls in love with Thomas, a German POW, and a friend of her cousin, Michael. Michael is also suffering from his passion for another one of the German POWs, Klaus, who is ill, possibly dying from TB. While Christine's saga constitutes the vast majority of the book, one can't quite help feeling that if the author had pursued the OTHER strand, where his own proclivities lied, in more detail, the book would have been more successful. As is, it isn't bad and certainly readable - but one feels King didn't really have his heart in it, and it is somewhat tame.