Facing the Sun

0/5 ( ratings)

To love someone bad is not a crime, it is just painful. That is the weakness of two members of one family who are separated by fifty years of British history. Facing the Sun is the story of racism and political extremism across two generations of a powerful British political family, which arcs from wartime Britain to today’s broken Britain.

The novel is aimed at teens to adult. There is no bad language but there is plenty of deceit, violence, revenge, treason and murder, involving a principal character who is still a schoolboy.

Jack Mosley is the son of an aristocratic fascist wartime leader who is eager for his father to love him. Steadily the son’s disappointment with love turns into bitterness and hate which is focused on hating Jews, just like his father does through his extremist political party. This is wartime England and that kind of hatred is becoming common. A focus for Jack’s hatred is a German émigré, a refugee and survivor of the notorious Kindertransport scheme, who has escaped from one nightmare only to enter into another.

The British Prime Minister is proven to be responsible for the military debacle in Dunkerque, France, that led to the death of Jack’s brother, the favoured son. The Prime Minister is not only a political rival to Jack’s father, but he is also a family friend, ‘Uncle’ and godfather to Jack. But Jack is not deterred and when his extremist father proposes revenge for his son’s death Jack is eager to volunteer for the assassination: regardless of the cost of treason and attempted murder, Jack is determined to win his father’s love.

Fifty years on and the Mosley dynasty is led by an intelligent and pretty blonde, she is also Britain’s youngest Member of Parliament riding on a tide of racism and anti immigration sweeping through the country. The new Mosley exhumes her ancestor’s treasonous past in the form of letters and embarks on a painful journey of political intrigue and self-discovery, which pushes her over a political and emotional edge.

Political violence resurges in modern day Britain, which is reflected in the 7th July bombings in London. Today’s enemy is Islamic and it is this hatred that fuels young Mosley’s political ambitions.

Facing the Sun is an historical thriller, it is circular in its approach to the themes of racism and how history repeats itself. The novel’s moral is straightforward though, that to love someone bad is not a crime, it is just painful.