From Publishers Weekly
Shot down during the battle of Dunkirk, Flying Officer Wayne Robert George Henry Luthie is captured and tortured by the enemy before he escapes and returns to England. Believing that "analyzing, examining and inspecting" his prewar experience will help him understand both the trauma he suffered at the hands of the Germans and the horrors of war, he begins writing, in "fits and starts," a record of his life. The fictional result, this cerebral first novel, uses stream-of-consciousness narration to recall a colonial childhood and to record life in the RAF at a base where young, inexperienced pilots, fueled on Benzedrine and brandy, undertake training runs and enemy aircraft recognition tests. While rich in period detail and not without cumulative effect, the book's stylized repetitions and pseudo-Modernist pastiche produce, in the end, a merely schematic effort. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
After Dunkirk, the summer and early autumn of 1941, was when the Battle of Britain began. This first novel vividly portrays that time, mostly from the perspective of an R.A.F. officer, W.R. Luthie, as related through his journal entries. At times meditative and at others sharply cinematic as Luthie shows how things looked and how they made him feel, the narrative is somewhat circular; it takes Luthie a long time to confront completely the secrets that weigh on his soul. Counterbalancing Luthie's journal, and his search through writing it for the meaning of his life, is the story of one of Luthie's pilots, Sergeant Ashley, told more traditionally in the third person. Both young men (Luthie "celebrates" his 21st birthday that summer of 1941) are struggling to understand not only the war of which they are a part but also what it means to be a just and mature person. Read as a war novel, or as a Bildungsroman, or as an attempt to fathom the nature of good and evil, this is a most satisfying novel. A treat for readers who want their fiction to make them think.?Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, MACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Boston Globe, Ellen Clegg
Her writing adapts the hypnotic, repetitive style of a man trying mightily to work out a few demons--but that is at once a strength and frailty. Her structure circles and swoops poetically (with profuse use of ellipses), always at the risk of a long ramble through the middle distance.... But McGraw's work has merit. Luthie is a remarkable character, a voice and intellect capable of rendering large truths without cliche.


Book Description
At the threshold of World War II, Wayne Luthie leads the Wonders, an inexperienced British flight squadron playing at war form a safe distance. But soon the fighting draws near. Grace Paley hailed as "memorable and remarkable" this extraordinary debut novel, resonant with the passion and themes of The English Patient and Saving Private Ryan.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What is the fate of a just man in a just war? At the onset of World War II, Wayne Luthie is the leader of an inexperienced British flight squadron. While his crew adapts to war from a safe distance, Luthie ponders the delights and puzzles of his childhood in India and falls in love with Nim, a WAAF. But soon the war escalates, with great consequence. Tranquil memories are tinged with remembered violence; riddles are revealed as insidious secrets.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Shot down during the battle of Dunkirk, Flying Officer Wayne Robert George Henry Luthie is captured and tortured by the enemy before he escapes and returns to England. Believing that "analyzing, examining and inspecting" his prewar experience will help him understand both the trauma he suffered at the hands of the Germans and the horrors of war, he begins writing, in "fits and starts," a record of his life. The fictional result, this cerebral first novel, uses stream-of-consciousness narration to recall a colonial childhood and to record life in the RAF at a base where young, inexperienced pilots, fueled on Benzedrine and brandy, undertake training runs and enemy aircraft recognition tests. While rich in period detail and not without cumulative effect, the book's stylized repetitions and pseudo-Modernist pastiche produce, in the end, a merely schematic effort.

Library Journal

After Dunkirk, the summer and early autumn of 1941, was when the Battle of Britain began. This first novel vividly portrays that time, mostly from the perspective of an R.A.F. officer, W.R. Luthie, as related through his journal entries. At times meditative and at others sharply cinematic as Luthie shows how things looked and how they made him feel, the narrative is somewhat circular; it takes Luthie a long time to confront completely the secrets that weigh on his soul. Counterbalancing Luthie's journal, and his search through writing it for the meaning of his life, is the story of one of Luthie's pilots, Sergeant Ashley, told more traditionally in the third person. Both young men (Luthie "celebrates" his 21st birthday that summer of 1941) are struggling to understand not only the war of which they are a part but also what it means to be a just and mature person. Read as a war novel, or as a Bildungsroman, or as an attempt to fathom the nature of good and evil, this is a most satisfying novel. A treat for readers who want their fiction to make them think.
-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Library, Randolph, MA

Kirkus Reviews

In this ambitious and only fitfully compelling first novel, a Czechoslovakian-born American writer offers an impressively researched and strongly felt portrayal of the life of a British airman before and during WWII. Protagonist and narrator Wayne Luthie sets out to narrate the story of his service as an RAF officer, his capture during the battle later known as "the miracle of Dunkirk," and his imprisonment and torture by the Germansþall in the irrational hope that by "reliving" it he may be able to change its outcome. But Luthie's control of his story (which includes letters home to his family in England) is subverted by fragmented memories: of his earliest years in India, where he was born to a middle-aged (and pacifist) father and young mother; boyhood in England and a painfully recalled relationship with his parents' married housemaid; flight training and combat experiences with subordinates and intimate friends; a frustratingly truncated affair with a compassionate nurse; scraps of childrenþs games and songs, miscellaneous fragments of pop culture, and the like, all jumbled together in a staccato stream of consciousness that's rendered in brief, gasping, often single-sentence or one-word paragraphs. The effect is unsettling, as if A Farewell to Arms had been written in the machine-gun style of James Ellroy's contemporary noir crime novels. And the language with which Luthie expresses his most heartfelt emotions is at once awkward and rhetorically inflated ("And so I took her and gave myself to her in. well, in bittersweet joy"). A bold first attempt that, at half its present length, might have been more involving.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

After Dunkirk clothes us into a dense rich mind, then makes us virtually become that mind as it encounters the bafflements, pleasures, and disasters of Britain -- and a handful of Britons -- in the Second World War. The long-gone reality is evoked so fully as, finally, to become our own. — Reynolds Price

Remarkable in so many ways. — Grace Paley

A great mysterium of literature. — Josef Skvorecky

"After Dunkirk lures us into a dense rich mind, then makes us virtually become that mind as it encounters the bafflements, pleasures, and disasters of Britain -- and a handful of Britons -- inthe Second World War. The long-gone reality is evoked so fuly as, finally, to become our own." — Reynolds Price

"After Dunkirk is everything one hopes a book will be -- powerful and beautiful in its constructon, thoughtful in its intent, unforgettable in its effect. Milena McGraw's subject is war, the consequence of war -- what it does to young men, old men, and women, its insidious as well as its overt wounding, its inescapable blight. Luthie, leader of a squandron of young men -- boys, really -- who daily fly their Spitfires into the Engllish skies, says, helplessly, 'I am a just man in a just war.' It matters not at all. It matters not at all that Luthie is also young, able, valiant, and well trained, or that he has met a woman and fallen in love and -- like any ordinary man -- dreams of reaching the farthest and best possibilities of their life togethr. With prose that is at times almost unbearably lurical, that is dismal with grief and splendid with perseverance, the author draws us into this book as into another living body. Luthie and his story are, simply, unforgettable." — Mary Oliver