Raven's first novel, from 1959 and obviously drawing on his experience of service in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. Alistair Lynch, a young officer in "Martock's Foot," falls in love with one of his own men and indiscreetly embarks on a passionate affair in the inappropriate surroundings of a forward camp in the mountains. Tragedy follows inevitably when the camp is attacked by rebels.
Alistair clearly has many of Raven's own characteristics: he's clever, lazy, vain, and a compulsive gambler, but good at keeping trouble at a safe distance, and therefore popular with the men he commands. (Crucially, however, he doesn't share Raven's famous talent for keeping emotional attachments out of his sexual relationships.) Raven distances himself somewhat from Alistair's attitudes by using the neutral persona of "Captain Andrew" as a first-person narrator. This device allows him to avoid any explicit descriptions of what went on in Alistair's tent (which would probably have got Raven into problems with the obscenity laws of the time), and also to avoid taking any moral stance on sex between men. Andrew's dissection of the events makes it clear that what mattered in this case was not the sexual relationship between Alistair and Drummer Hartley, but the emotional relationship between superior and inferior that set up jealousies within the unit and prejudiced its good functioning when the bullets started flying. The drawback to the first-person technique is that it does tempt Raven into rather a lot of analysis. He got a lot better at letting dialogue do the work for him later on, when he started writing a lot of TV scripts.
Obviously, this isn't the last word about "gays in the military," either. Raven speaks only for Raven, as ever, and would have been annoyed if anyone took this as a novel with a political agenda. Similarly, it would be silly to take the attitudes he ascribes to Alistair, Andrew and their colleagues too literally: the regiment he describes seems to have been a peculiarly reactionary one, even for the time; Colonial Kenya in the fifties was probably not the most enlightened place in the world, either.
But it's a very well-built, entertaining, and articulately told story. There's a good slow build up to the tragedy, an excellent court martial third act, and a neat twist in the ending. The setting of the grand finale perhaps feels more like the Chapel at Charterhouse than a military funeral, but it works. ( )