Darkness Falls from the Air

Darkness Falls from the Air was first published in 1942. It was written while the bombing it describes was still going on, written when the outcome of the war was as yet undecided. This fact makes it a very different sort of novel to those written later and looking back on the same events. Balchin's writing has an immediacy which can not be recaptured by someone writing years later. He is writing before the London Blitz became mythologized by subsequent generations. His account avoids the clichés of London's heroic resistance and gives the reader a sense of what living through the air raids must have been like. The story concerns Bill Sarratt who works in the civil service. He recognises that the bureaucracy which has built up during peacetime is harming the war effort and constantly fights to make his colleagues and superiors see that reform is necessary. He is continually frustrated by vested interests and incompetence. Balchin's attack on the petty functionaries who run the country rings true. It is amazing really, given wartime censorship and the demands of propaganda, that he was allowed to write it at all. Sarratt also has marital difficulties. His wife Marcia is having an affair with a sensitive but weak man. Sarratt deals with this triangular relationship by allowing his wife to do as she pleases. All three meet up periodically and everyone is extremely polite on the surface, but the tensions are there and inevitably come to the surface. Balchin's account of a marriage in trouble is as interesting as his descriptions of the Blitz. The manners of these people, the way they interact, seem to come from a world as remote as the world of Jane Austen. Balchin again avoids cliché. He avoids moralizing. Marcia is a sympathetic character and is not condemned. Sarratt just wants her to have her fling and come back to him. It is how this love triangle resolves itself, and how it is all connected with the bombs which continue to fall, which makes this novel so well worth reading.