How Many Miles to Babylon?

I started on a shelf-clearing exercise which – of course – was doomed from the get-go. I mean – if you are sorting through books, it’s guaranteed that you will very quickly find something that you must immediately sit down and read. 

The culprit in this particular case was a novella I’ve read twice before but – as the last time was more than 40 years ago – that was more of a spur than a deterrent. And anyway it was a cold afternoon and November 11th to boot. The timing was perfect. 

Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? is a great read and I recommend it. 

Shot at Dawn

The story opens with a stark scene:  A young Irish officer, Alexander (Alec) Moore, sits alone in a cell on the Western Front in 1915, awaiting execution.

He has been allowed his notebooks, pen, and ink, and he begins to write his last thoughts –  a calm, reflective account – almost a confessional –  of how he came to be there.

“I have no future,” he says. “I am committed to no cause. I love no living person.”

The story that follows unfolds in flashback, moving from his lonely Anglo-Irish childhood to the war that destroys him.

Outside the war goes on without him

By now the attack must be on. A hundred yards of mournful earth, a hill topped with a circle of trees that at home would have belonged exclusively to the fairies, a farm, some roofless cottages, quiet unimportant places, now the center of the world for tens of thousands of men. The end of the world for many, the heroes and the cowards, the masters and the slaves. It will no doubt be raining on them, a thick and evil February rain.

This is a beautifully written book and the prose manages to be both taut and lyrical, pared to the essentials yet freighted with feeling. 

Johnston evokes the emotional chill of Alec’s aristocratic upbringing – his cold, controlling mother, the distant ineffective father, and a bleak Irish countryside. Alec is the only child of distant  parents who hate each other. 

“Their words rolled past me up and down the polished length of the table. Their conversations were always the same, like some terrible game, except that unlike normal games, the winner was always the same. They never raised their voices, the words dropped malevolent and cool from their well-bred mouths.”

His only real connection comes with an unexpected friendship with Jerry Crowe, a local Catholic boy from a working-class family. Their friendship is formed around common bonds  – a love of horses, and family disaffection. It defies every social, political, and religious boundary. 

Connection, Friendship, Love

Alec’s mother is beautiful but she is manipulative, selfish and unfeeling. When she discovers the friendship between her son and Jerry, she destroys it with the same ruthless malevolence as the army officers Alec serves under later. The Major at the front  –  heartless, efficient, pitiless –  is her mirror image in khaki.

Alec’s economically privileged childhood is cold and emotionally stifling. His military world is its moral continuation. Both are built on cruelty and both demand obedience.

This is a book about friendship. The war is real but it is the backdrop to a story of human connection. It also carries a simmering homoerotic charge worthy of D.H.Lawrence. 

It was first published in 1974 –  seven years after male homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain but nearly two decades before it was in Ireland. How Many Miles to Babylon? handles this controversial subtext with subtlety. 

The novel’s power lies in its understatement. Johnston doesn’t dramatise the friendship between Alec and Jerry. The emotional charge sits just below the surface as it builds from their first encounter at the lake. On the night before they enlist, drunk, they swim naked in the icy lake. In the trenches, Jerry massages Alec’s chilblained feet with rum; later, as the two rest side by side, Alec writes, 

“The beating of our hearts was like the cracking wings of swans lifting slowly from the lake, leaving disturbed water below.”

This is a love story. 

Swans and Yeats

Swans are a recurring motif and they connected the novel’s two worlds: the lake of Alec’s childhood and the churned mud of the Western Front. His mother feeds them each day and hearing her speak to them Alec the child feels a glimmer of love for his mother. When a soldier later shoots one, Alec’s horror is immediate –  the act is both literal and symbolic, the destruction of innocence.

A traditional folk song that the book its title and lines from it mark the passage of events. Lines from W.B. also through the novel like a ghost at key moments: As a boy, Alec recites Yeats to Jerry by the lake

“Rose of all roses, Rose of all the world,
And heard ring the bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.”

Later, in the trenches, another line slips out – “Far off and secret and inviolate Rose.” These fragments are a kind of connecting thread, marking when poetry becomes a refuge from brutality or detachment. Awaiting his execution Alex writes  “I am committed to no cause. I love no living person.” –  a line that recalls Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Like the swans, this echo of Yeats is not direct because that would have been anachronistic. Rather it evokes a time and sensibility and anchors the story in a long lost Ireland. 

Johnston’s imagery is spare but she makes every word and image count. The Irish and French landscapes merge into one continuous desolation:

“Memories slide up to the surface of the mud, like weeds to the surface of the sea, once you begin to stir the depths where every word, every gesture, every sigh, lies hidden.”

“The lake was in one of its black moods. It heaved uncomfortably and its blackness was broken from time to time by tiny figures of white, mistakes.”

The factual details are not flawless: the Royal Irish Rifles were indeed on the Western Front in 1914–15, but there were no major British offensives in February 1915. It’s a minor quibble, like the anachronism of the soldiers wearing tin helmets, which were not issued until later that year. (Alec’s quick  commission in the Royal Irish Rifles also seems improbable)  But these details are trivial beside the novel’s emotional precision. The deeper truth here is psychological.

My copy of the book Fontana paperback edition, 1981  features William Orpen’s Ready to Start on the cover. Orpen was a successful society portrait painter and, like Alec, Anglo-Irish. You can read his own story of his WW1 experience and misadventures – An Onlooker in France 1917-1919.  Quite the character. the painting is a self-portrait in uniform, in his room in Amiens in 1917,

Revisiting How Many Miles to Babylon? I was struck by its quiet power. It’s a novel about friendship, love, class, and the deadly ways cruelty manifests.  Johnston writes with restraint, but the emotion runs like an underground river just below the surface. This is a small book with an emotional heft  that is precise, unsentimental, and moving.

Novellas in November

At just over 150 pages How many Miles to Babylon? counts as a novella so I’m adding this to:

#NovNov25
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