A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (1953)

This novel has an outlook which should guarantee grimness. And miraculously somehow it doesn't. It's the story of aristocratic John Grant who has three days' worth of second world war in Italy where he is hounded by his doubts of himself, uncertain in his responses to his men and ends up in a horrific nervous funk which leads to an appalling accident and the death of one of the men. After the war his catalogue of uncertainty continues, with relationships a continuous source of teeth-clenching: bursts of bravado alternate with awful melancholy and searing nervous intensity. The most extraordinary thing is the feeling one gets that Charteris intended Grant in a substantial way as a self-portrait. He is thoroughly tough with most of his characters, examining their every last failing with a microscopic eye. He is the same with Grant, though - himself! This is a classic English mid-century novelised autobiography, revealing the dark truth within, completely unsparing of the author's own negative aspects. As such it is a brave book. Given that prognosis, it could have been a miserable read. The subject matter definitely is. But this is where the miracle occurs - Charteris' intense, complex, allusive prose has something special in it, something like the perfect mixture of mind, muscle and poetry; a heady, searching multi-facetedness which is not only pleasing to the gut, but ultimately even redemptive.