Log Across The Road - State Of Emergency Part II

Log Across the Road – State of Emergency Part II (1973) by Sheila Ross – Fontana

There are road obstructions, and then there are road obstructions.

A traffic cone is inconvenient. Roadworks are tiresome. A fallen branch may require somebody to get out of the car and move it.

But when you are travelling through the Malayan jungle in 1952, at the height of the Emergency, and discover a log deliberately placed across the road, it is probably best not to assume the council will be along shortly to clear it.

Sheila Ross’s A Log Across the Road, presented here as Part II of State of Emergency, begins with ten men travelling through territory threatened by guerrilla violence. One of them asks the apparently harmless question: what were you doing ten years ago? From there, the novel looks backwards into their lives, tracing them through the Second World War and the difficult years that followed until their separate histories begin to form one complicated pattern. 

Which is rather more interesting than the usual answer to “What were you doing ten years ago?”, which generally involves staring into the middle distance and trying to remember where you lived.

These men, unfortunately, have proper answers.

Their histories involve war, love, divided loyalties, bitterness, hardship, alcohol, relationships that overlap in distinctly inconvenient ways and past decisions that have stubbornly refused to remain in the past. One has known and loved the wives of two of his companions; another has previously fought alongside the very guerrillas he is now pursuing. Their lives have crossed before, sometimes without their fully appreciating how much. 

Ross gradually draws those strands together against the wider upheaval of war and post-war Malaya, until the ten men arrive at the same journey through the jungle.

And the log.

Suddenly the title begins to sound considerably less rustic.

This is the sort of novel that enjoys reminding the reader that history is rarely experienced as a neat sequence of dates. For the people actually living through it, history consists mostly of trying to get through Tuesday without being shot, betrayed, abandoned or forced into an extremely difficult conversation with someone whose wife you once loved.

Against the larger political and military background, the novel concentrates on individual lives and the emotional baggage carried into the present. The result is less a straightforward jungle adventure than a web of personal histories gradually tightening around a group of men who happen to find themselves travelling together through a particularly dangerous part of the world.

The story’s 1952 Malayan Emergency setting gives it an atmosphere of uncertainty in which apparently ordinary journeys can suddenly become extremely serious. The Emergency itself provides the backdrop, but Ross uses it to bring together people whose private histories are already complicated enough before anybody starts putting trees across roads. 

This Fontana paperback edition was published in 1973, following the novel’s original publication by Collins in 1971, and runs to roughly 350 pages — enough room for Ross to properly entangle everybody before allowing them anywhere near the jungle. 

It is an appealing choice for readers of historical fiction, wartime and post-war novels, stories of colonial Malaya, ensemble dramas and books in which a group of apparently separate characters gradually turn out to have been wandering through one another’s lives all along.

It also provides a useful reminder that when somebody in a novel asks, “What were you doing ten years ago?”, the correct response is probably to change the subject immediately.

This copy is in Good condition, having survived rather more peacefully than most of the people within it.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where logs across roads are considered a transport problem, complicated romantic histories are somebody else’s business, and all journeys through terrorist-infested jungle must be arranged independently.

ISBN: 0006133029
Condition: Good

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