At the beginning of Paul Watkins’s outstanding new novel The Ice Soldier (Henry Holt, 352 pages), narrator William Bromley embraces his quiet life. Just six years before, he served as a British soldier during World War II, and he now teaches English at a small boys’ school. To pass the time, he plays cards with two colleagues, avoids the woman he has a crush on, and meets for a weekly wine binge with his old friend Stanley. When the appearance of a former comrade Sugden triggers intense flashbacks to a failed mission in the Italian Alps, Bromley knows he is in trouble. His best friend Stanley does not understand his crisis, and instead presses him to meet the new love of his life, Helen Paradise (“Hell and Paradise?”), who, unlike the two men, has not given up mountaineering. Bromley seems destined to lead a quiet but tortured life while Stanley heads toward the inevitable break-up with Helen. When Stanley’s uncle Carton ensures that the “Society of Former Mountaineers,” as Stanley and Bromley call themselves, will disband, the two men find themselves faced with their internal demons in ways neither had imagined.

At the center of this novel lies Carton’s Rock, a “jagged pinnacle of stone and ice which rose almost sheer out of a glacier.” Named after Stanley’s uncle Carton, the only person said to have reached its summit, the peak–or rather, the idea of it–has become a kind of tourist attraction in London, where Carton makes a living out of his retelling of his harrowing expedition. To Bromley, Carton’s Rock carries its own diabolical memories, ones which threaten to cripple him every day. Still, he is drawn to the stark beauty of it rising out of the treacherous glacier. Stanley sees Carton’s Rock as a symbol of his uncle’s control, and he rebels against it, although as a younger man he would have liked to scale it. Even Helen has seen the Rock, and, safe in London, she regrets not getting closer to it. This duality, of both desire and desperate distance, gives The Ice Soldier its shape.

Watkins evokes post-World War II Britain with the same astonishing clarity that he uses to describe the abject loneliness of the mountain climber and his adversary, the mountain itself. The narrator’s flashbacks to the war are vivid and horrifying. The most accomplished aspect of this novel, however, is how Watkins gets into the hearts of his characters with the surety of his razor-like prose. As the characters get closer to Carton’s Rock and all that it symbolizes, the rawness of what lies inside each is exposed much like the bones of Archie, the skeleton Carton seats at the head of his London dinner table. The metaphor of the mountaineer as losing everything but his bones, of being stripped of flesh and spit back out decades after being swallowed by a glacier, serves as a warning to the characters, who must learn the truth not by dreaming about it, but by climbing. The reader is only too willing to accompany them.

I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. Watkins knows how to not only tell a compelling story, but to make it linger in the minds of his readers.

— Debbie Lee Wesselmann, author of  Trutor and the Balloonist (1997) and Captivity (2008).