‘The Rescue Man’, debut novel of Anthony Quinn, is slow moving tale of a man changed by war. Set in Liverpool throughout World War Two, it is clearly a love letter to the city by Liverpool-born Quinn. It focusses on a love triangle between a historian and two photographers.
Tom Baines is a quiet architectural historian in his late thirties. He lives in the past, researching a book about Liverpool’s buildings which he somehow never manages to finish. In 1939, his mentor recommends he research a misunderstood Liverpool architect, Peter Eames who mysteriously committed suicide leaving his work never properly recognised.
When war breaks out Baines volunteers as a rescue man, working in teams to extract people and bodies from the bombed buildings he was supposedly cataloguing for his book. This experience, and the people he works with, have a profound impact and slowly his life changes. His language coarsens, thanks to mixing with the men on his team, and in response to his publisher’s request to speed up his research of the city’s buildings before they are destroyed by bombs, he meets husband and wife photographers Richard and Bella.
The romance is a long time coming and the first half of the book seems to meander along without urgency, Tom is a quiet, academic unassuming man and I had to work at sticking with the book. I wondered what there was in him which attracted the bright flower, Bella.
Tom Baines says, ‘It was only when war came and I started doing rescue woke that I sort of... woke up.’ Unfortunately the book is a third through before we reach 1940 and the bombing of Liverpool and two-thirds through before the pace picks up. There is a sense of time being suspended until the final quarter of the book is reached and, as the brutality of the bombing clears street after Liverpool street and many of the historic buildings Baines was meant to catalogue are reduced to rubble, Tom hits crisis point.
The pace is not helped as the story of Peter Eames is told via diary extracts which are stop start with substantial gaps. The themes of wartime destruction – not only of buildings, but of trust between family, lovers and friends – are mirrored between the Eames and Baines timelines. Architect Eames builds, rescue man Baines negotiates the rubble left by the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids. And both are key players in love triangles where trust is betrayed and marriage vows broken.
This is Anthony Quinn’s debut novel and though thoughtful like his later books, it lacks their narrative pace. If you are familiar with Liverpool, which I’m not, it will be a more fulfilling read. There is no doubt about Quinn’s beautiful writing, simply that the subject – and the perhaps over-use of the Liverpool setting – did not hold me. Not his best book but well worth reading if you know his later work such as ‘Freya’.
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Novels that have a real geographical setting but in which the author inserts his own invented locations are fascinating. Your mind pictures the exact places mentioned but then comes the imaginary street or building. Are you sure you know where you are or not? Mr Quinn uses the real life of a nineteenth century Liverpool architect and fictionalises it. The main character is an architectural historian the time is the blitz during the Second World War. Excellent if you know the city and equally good if you are a fan of the doomed love affair. The author's descriptions of life during the heavy bombing of the blitz are terrific and terrible. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, a little slow going at times but a very good insight into the city of Liverpool during WWII. It is also a story within a story focusing on a little remembered architect of the 1860 Peter Eames, which is fascinating.
Tom Baines an historian in Liverpool has been asked to write a book detailing the architectural past of the City and he is to include photographs of the buildings for posterity, through his work on the book he meets Richard and Bella Tanqueray which starts a very intense friendship between the three of them. It is a very unsure time of war when lives are lost and personal tragedy is all around. Poignant and heartwarming at the same time, to know people will fight back and survive no matter what! A very interesting read.(l ( )

I can quote the final sentences of this novel without revealing anything about how the story ends, and I think they are worth quoting because they encapsulate much of what this excellent book is about: "Whole streets and lanes were disappearing, their names remembered only by word of mouth, or in the forgotten folds of disused maps. These brief candles. They were blowing out their own past … But maybe he'd got that wrong. Maybe you couldn't destroy history. You could only add to it."

These are the closing thoughts of Edward Baines, the central character, an architectural historian living in Liverpool who, when war breaks out in 1939, has been engaged for some time on a book about the buildings of his home city. The outbreak of war and the threat of what may be lost if, as expected, the city becomes a bombing target, finally prompts Baines to press on with gathering his material, and the phoney war gives him the time he needs to get the job done before the bombs start to fall. To speed the process he switches from sketching the buildings to capturing them on camera. Fatefully, this brings him into contact with a photographer who saw action in the trenches in the 1914-18 war, and with his wife, a one time art student with such daring modern ways as a tendency to wear trousers. It is also through contact with the photographer that thirty eight year old Baines ends up contributing to the war effort by joining one of the teams set up to rescue people from bombed buildings, rather than through military service.

The "history" referred to in the closing lines goes beyond the historic buildings of Liverpool. The past is present in this novel in a number of ways. At the same time as researching his book, Baines is also reading the journals of an architect active in the city in the 1860s, a character whose own story features almost as prominently here as the main 1940s plot. History is also present in Baines's own past. The novel explores how being orphaned as a child and then witnessing the tragic death of a close friend may have contributed to his own failure to do much with his life until the war came along.

Room is also found to show how his war work brings the main character closer than ever before to the ordinary working men of his home town, to touch on attitudes towards the port held by southerners, and to foreshadow the city's post-ware decline.

My only real gripe is with the somewhat compressed font used for the extensive quotations from the journals of Eames, the fictional 1860s architect. (I think it was Bookman Old Style but don't quote me on that.) I didn't find this font very easy on the eye, and did not think that its "old" look was necessary to remind the reader that this was an extract from a nineteenth century journal which would in any case have been hand written. That I read-on regardless is further evidence of the quality content that made the small effort worthwhile. ( )