A solitary war Book

This book is the thirteenth in a vast sequence of novels (known collectively as A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight) by the nature writer Henry Williamson, who will always be best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, but whose reputation has suffered because of his support for Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists before the outbreak of WWII. Williamson, who never really recovered from his own experience of fighting in the First World War ("Someone said to me I looked as though I'd really died in the war."), was determined that it really would be the war to end all wars; and seems genuinely to have believed that old soldiers like him, T.E. Lawrence, Mosley and Hitler (!) could prevent another one. Having failed to do so, HW decided to get back to the land which was always his true love and become a farmer. In this he felt he was fulfilling, in a non-political and in a non-violent way, Mosley's belief in a Greater Britain.
HW's involvement with Mosley's very British type of Fascism is fictionalised in the previous volume in the series, The Phoenix Generation (see my review), in which we see our protagonist Phillip Maddison become a card-carrying member of Hereward Birkin's Imperial Socialist Party. At the end of the novel, as his hopes for peace are shattered, he fears a Wagnerian Twilight of the Gods; but he determines to act as the historian of the new era that will be born out of the conflagration.
But although the fifteen volumes of the Chronicle have copious historical detail, I see HW as a mythographer as much as a chronicler of his times.
A Solitary War charts Phillip's first years as a farmer (the fulsome details of which might try the patience of even the most dedicated Archers fan) as he attempts to balance the work of improving the land with his literary work and at the same time manage his emotional and sexual entanglements. A particularly bleak episode, under the innocuous title of 'Melissa's Visit,' describes a failed sexual encounter: "He wanted desperately to possess her, but the passion was all in his head, making him passive ... he lacked the natural impulse: love beyond all hopeless love, love to shore himself against the unfaceable darkness of death."
The phrase "all in his head" may bring to mind what D.H. Lawrence calls "sex in the head"; and HW will invoke Lawrence ("that harassed and lacerating writer") in one of the most extraordinary, multi-layered episodes towards the end of the book in which, walking through the woods to see how his sugar-beets are being hoed, he sees a hare: He knows he should shoot it before it eats his crops; but the hare becomes a symbol to him of the fear produced by parental conflict on an "imagination-living being" like himself...like Lawrence...and like Hitler: "the awful dilemma in the world of the spirit which only genius knew, world of anguish, faith, hope, and clarity ... Was that the imaginative basis of the Third Reich?" Without the balance of "mated love", the mind of the "man of genius" runs in "horrific convolutions."
The overwhelming impression I gained from this book was one of disillusion: with his friends and lovers, with his back-to-the-land idealism, with any attempt by politicians like Birkin to beat the financial system: "I sentence you to death by accountancy." This is the judgment of "the principle of usury" which HW, like Ezra Pound (whose radio broadcasts from Fascist Italy Phillip refers to as "a soft, gentle voice talking didactically about Usury, and the poet's hope for a clearer humanity"), blamed for being the cause of the war: "How strange that so few people heeded the authentic voice of a decimated generation which did not believe in Britain being lost."
But his own opposition to war and the causes of war has a personal cost: As the title suggests, he is increasingly isolated by his now well-known stance; and at different times he is accused of being a fifth-columnist, is beaten up and has swastikas daubed on his truck; and is even briefly interned under wartime regulations. At the same time, he struggles to understand how he could have been so wrong about Hitler, whom he begins to see as Faust or as Lucifer; and it is the Lightbringer in the darkness, sometimes heralding, sometimes eclipsed by the sunlight, who will give HW the title for the next volume in the Chronicle: Lucifer Before Sunrise.

PS: The striking but controversial cover design for the first (1966) edition of A Solitary War, featuring a swastika super-imposed on the Union Flag, was changed by the publishers when the book was reprinted in 1985. The dust jacket alone makes it worthwhile to search out the original hardback, although cheaper paperback editions are available.