Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

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The story is a series of episodes in the youth of George Sherston, ranging from his first attempts to learn to ride to his experiences in winning point-to-point races.

Messages start coming in of friends who have been killed, but these are abstract thoughts, like hearing about a natural disaster that happened two thousand miles away. Homosexuality also gets a look in: three male friendships feature prominently in the book and can either be treated as bromances or as veiled homosexual encounters - both are satisfactory for the reader.

Sassoon's narrative can be portrayed as an admiring tribute to the English class system and a certain way of doing things (see John Crace's hilarious digested read of the book), but I have doubts. He is referring to the fox and to someone about to alert the other riders and dogs to the proper direction taken by the fox. In essence, the privileged life narrated in the first part of this book is thrown into stark relief as the horrors of life in the trenches is described in equally vivid detail. He also says that Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is "carefully sanitised" and that all Sassoon "wanted was the past".

We threw a few Mills' bombs at a German working-party who were putting up some wire and had no wish to do us any harm. If truth be known, more than fame or money or prestige, I most crave to not ”be interfered with too much. His writing is crisp and tinged by nostalgia, the humor is subtle and he paints beautiful pictures of a world about be be torn apart by war and the modernity of the 20th century. Whether it has or whether it hasn't, I continue to scrape my puttees, and the weasel goes about his business. One of the most obvious symptoms of this ambivalence about the new world is Sassoon's dislike of modernism in literature.

However a change was coming and the catalyst was the slaughterhouse now known as WW1, although at the time it was known as the 'Great War' of 'The War to end all Wars. It is a depiction of his early years presented in the form of an autobiographical novel, with false names being given to the central characters, including Sassoon himself, who appears as "George Sherston". It has been a couple of years since I read this book but it left a deep impression and I commend it to everyone. This is the first of three volumes, the second and third of which focus more closely on Sassoon's wartime experiences. Sassoon/Sherston is just beginning to get a glimmering of what he wants to do with the rest of his life.