Upon a Wheel of Fire

Yves Beauchamp is our narrator, an English officer who has survived the Great War. Awarded the MC, he finds himself appointed as Lloyd George's driver in Paris in 1919. Over the course of a drunken evening, LG reveals to Yves why the treaty he is about to sign in Versailles will not work and that he has no choice but to sign. ('...but I am bound/Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears/Do scald like molten lead,' he quotes from Lear). LG proves to be a huge influence on Yves, and his words haunt him as events begin to unfold. After coming back to England in 1920, Yves is appointed a King's Messenger, a driver delivering intelligence between the embassies of Paris and Berlin and London. He meets General Franz Halder, the man who planned a coup against Hitler in 1938. Yves delivers this information to the Foreign Office, which cynically ignores it, just as Chamberlain is about to board a plane for his infamous meeting with Hitler in Munich. The novel is one man's exploration of how these events (im)possibly happened, and about both the individual's responsibility and impotence in the face and course of history. Paul Grieve's interweaving of fact and fiction, of historical and fictional characters, has produced a gripping and impassioned narrative of the first half of Europe's century. There is a real appetite for this kind of fiction: Birdsong, Regeneration and The English Patient to which this novel bears genuine comparison - are obvious examples. We want to examine our history while it's still within living memory. And because the ramifications of both these wars press on us still in many, and sometimes bloody, ways. It is a breathtaking achievement for a first novel.