SYNOPSIS
What if you remembered a life before this one?
But didn’t understand why.
Until the pieces began to fit.
Almost a hundred years ago there was a war to end all wars, a global tragedy now the province of historians. But in our time, this autumn, in a picturesque forested town, two influential men recall clear and detailed memories of World War I, retained first-hand experience from a century ago. Neither can forgive, nor forget injustice. Only one will find his way.
Leon Rose is a generous, prospering nurseryman, outwardly content in the small Oregon town of Elder. But he’s unaware he’s in Elder to confront certain unfinished business, a course hidden in his subconscious until now. For Leon, this is a long connected path of conflict, of great causes fought for religion and empire long ago in previous lives. Familiar memories, anger and longing begin to surface at inconvenient moments.
Jim House is Elder’s ambitious mayor, who fears both obscurity and a photograph in a long-closed book. Through that portrait-photograph he’s confronted by a sudden recollection, an awful knowing from a prior life. Disturbed by the subjective line between fame and infamy, he self-justifies his controversial central role in the outcome of World War I, while knowing the consensus published in the reference books in his own library. Determined to find contemporary prominence and to refute the historians, Jim House chafes against the confinements of his office as mayor of Elder.
At the same time, Leon Rose’s spontaneous visions from his past (from what he gradually realizes was another life) leave no doubt that Jim House is more than an infuriating political enemy. During a winner-take-all six-week campaign to defeat House as Elder’s mayor, Leon’s resurfacing memories of combat trauma during World War I propel him toward emotional instability. To Leon, Jim House is the continuity of unrepentant infamy, the individual still accountable for the mindless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of the British Empire’s best and brightest in the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele. Leon begins to act and feel just as he did a century ago when he lived as Curtis Merlo, an innovative but bitter British infantry captain. For this traumatized part of his soul, time is locked; it is 1917. Reality becomes the circles of angry inner voices demanding justice. Leon begins to repeat an emotional progression toward the assassination of what he perceives is a treacherous public figure. His case for justifiable homicide in two centuries is complicated by perfect remembrance of a tall, mysterious beauty, Jenny Northam, who had withheld marriage and pleaded with Curtis in 1915 to leave England, his career and the draft, for a monastic life of prayer for Europe in peaceful, independent Siam.
For Leon, in present-day Elder, the same fork in his life’s direction reappears as it had in previous lives. He can choose one of two wastelands: Long-overdue revenge, betrayed trust and friends, and the price of murder. The other: exile, surrender of respect and financial security in Elder, and the loneliness of freefall into the unknown. He chooses, unaware of the effect of his choice on so many, acting on a maxim he heard a century ago in London: “You are their servant, night and day . . . night and day. Look after them.”
© COPYRIGHT 2009 Steven M. Webb
