The Anguish of Aftermath

Historical fiction is as much about the present as the past. This has become something of a truism now. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can be understood as a critique of McCarthy’s witch hunts, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke as an indictment of his country’s “neo-Vietnam,” the Iraq War. With The Plot Against America, Philip Roth plays it both ways: he lays bare America's pre-war anti-Semitism in a narrative that also eviscerates George Bush Jr.'s presidency.

Given the times in which we live, it is hard therefore not to read Stephen Finucan’s fine debut novel, The Fallen—set during the Allied occupation of Naples, at the close of the Second World War—in the light of our own current occupation of Afghanistan. Not that the novel insists on such wooden comparisons—it is too elegant for that, too entangled in the particularities of its historical era to be so transparently displaced. And yet our rising death toll and grim reports from...