My Brother Johnny

Set in an unnamed Italian village, this short novel is a kind of parable about the evils of war. Belinda, who tells the story, is 13 and ‘a bit of a punk’. She knows that the village disapproves of her (‘she’s got a pin in her nose, she’s got hair like the “Last of the Mohicans”’). She is a rebel in a place which prizes conformity and convention. But Belinda’s great asset is her older brother, Johnny, whom she adores. After an exemplary school career, Johnny has joined the Air Force and gone to fight in a war ‘Over There’. ‘Over There’ is never identified, though it resembles Afghanistan. To his patriotic and unthinking village, Johnny is a hero. But when he comes home, sickened by the impersonal brutality of bombing civilian targets and dropping land mines on innocent peasant villagers, and when he then sets up his personal peace camp in the village square, he is vilified and baited by the chauvinistic locals who once idolised him. Supernatural events, especially a ghostly air raid bringing home to the village the reality of what its warriors are doing Over There, reinforce Johnny’s protest and finally, just possibly, change attitudes. Belinda herself is an engaging eyewitness and storyteller, and the novel’s heart is in the right place, but this is overwhelmingly a morality tale, and the story’s voice is drowned out by the sheer noise of its message.