Sadie Jones–SMALL WARS
Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews, Cyprus, England, Historical on Jan 17th, 2011
The waning days of the British Occupation of Cyprus were times filled with revolutionary zeal and guerilla attacks by Cypriots demanding independence. For the British, Cyprus represented one of the last colonies in the Empire, and they believed that its loss at the hands of “a few insurgents” would cause further damage to Britain’s waning international prestige. By January 1956, the British and the Cypriots were in their third year of a terrorist “Emergency.” Major Hal Treherne, a career soldier from a family of career soldiers, is assigned the job of patrolling villages in the south of Cyprus, conducting searches, and identifying suspects so that they can be turned over to the Special Investigations Branch for interrogation. This very readable, fast-paced narrative includes action scenes so vivid they sometimes resemble films. Hal’s life is one emergency after another, one battle after another, one moral quandary after another, and the reader quickly identifies with him in his emotional turmoil.
