Bomber

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Len Deighton’s devastating novel is a gripping minute-by-minute account of what happens over the next twenty-four hours. There are also observations pertaining to pilot attitudes toward the rear echelon bureaucrats who made strategic decisions far from the air war provoking aviator anger. When the dramatised version of Bomber was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it was transmitted in "real time" throughout the day, to incredible critical and audience response. Deighton brings home to the reader just how much sheer luck influenced which crews survived, and which perished.

To this accolade can be added Anthony Burgess's opinion of it being amongst the finest 99 books written in the English language since 1939. Deighton also strives (unsuccessfully) for a bit of Heller-like farce in the person of a base commander who tries to get a reluctant Sam Lambert to play cricket on his team. Because it’s obvious from the outset that something will go very wrong on the bombing mission that’s the centerpiece of the story. On the other hand, the experience and reaction of ordinary townspeople to being bombed by seven hundred aircraft will surely never again be portrayed in all of its forensic horror like Deighton has done here.

There is a lot of technical detail, and if I have one criticism it is that it seems a little bit leaden in the middle of the multiple plot lines. It deals with the simple horrors of the mass bombings that took place over Germany at the end of the war.

The ten consisted of three trilogies, beginning with Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match from 1983 to 1985, and a prequel.The epigraph to Bomber starkly records the vast quantity of ordnance that was being dropped on North Vietnam at the time Deighton was writing.