2. The Chasm by Victor Canning

This book was published in 1947 and was one of Victor Canning's first books. I expected it to be more of a detective story but it turned out that it is more like a traditional piece of dramatic fiction. The book is set in Italy immediately after the end of WWII and is focused around an English soldier living in Italy called Burgess who is having a rough time dealing with the aftermath of the war. During the war he lost his three best friends and his fiance left him and married another man. Both of these events caused him some trauma to the point that he often halucinates and the thinks he hears his friends voices only to turn around and find that it is someone that he doesn't know. Finally his shrink tells him to leave the base in Bologna and go for a holiday in order to cure himself by doing some soul searching and trying to identify what is really bothering him. So, he heads off to Florence where he wanders around the city visiting all the sites that him and his friends had visited and doing all of the things that they had done together. This exercise is doing nothing for him other than exacerbating his condition.

While at a bar he meets up with an army acquaintance called Marsh who advises him to get out into the country and find some place where he can take in the mountain air and go for long walks to clear his head. Burgess listens and heads off into the countryside and stops at a town called Cappo and checks into the local hotel. On one of his walks he spots a young woman and a boy and decides to follow them. He catches up with them and starts talking to them and he is immediately captivated by the young woman's beauty. He goes to their village and being friendly Italians they invite him to stay with them.

While at this village he discovers that the lord of the village is in fact a Nazi soldier who is hiding out from the authorities. At this point the story diverges into three major themes: his love affair with Gemma who is engaged to a hot headed Italian, his attempts to out the Nazi soldier, and his continued efforts to deal with his hallucinations.

This is not as good a book as the other Canning novels that I have read. His writing is far too colorful and melodramatic for my liking and he makes a number of convenient logical leaps that are just not believable. For example, at one point he looks into the eyes of one of the villagers and realizes that the villager is allied with the Nazi soldier. It is an entertaining read but I wouldn't rush to put it on your bookshelves.

As an aside, the back cover says that the book will be one of Columbia Pictures' "biggest British productions." I don't think that it was ever made into a movie though.