Forever 33 / Jacques Byfield

Forever 33, the title of Jacques By-field's first novel, comes from a war song, "A soldier knows that he will die, and buried deep he'll be. The digger may live to ninety-nine, but he'll stay thirty-three." The digger is the grave-digger and the "he" who'll stay thirty-three is the dead soldier, assuming that he was thirty-three when he died. In this novel the digger and the soldier are one and the same person. The time is 1938; the setting a town of 500 close to the U.S. border in the Badlands of Alberta. The digger comes mysteriously and stays until he is certain there will be a second European war. He has lost his leg in the First World War, and before the second breaks out, he has returned to his British homeland to take part in it. Between these two events we get to know a great deal about the townspeople and almost nothing about our hero, John Evans, except that the townspeople come to view him as uncannily prescient. There is a dollop of condescension here as if our British-born novelist sees remittance men essentially romantically.