Free Fall

Sammy Mountjoy is swept into World War II and somehow, somewhere,  he loses his freedom, the faculty of freewill ‘that cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes’. As he retraces his life in an effort to discover why he no longer has the power to choose and decide for himself, the narrative moves between England and a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He begins to realise what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. But did those accumulated choices also begin to deprive him of his free will?

‘Free Fall is an inquiry into some of the deepest human questions, but it also recreates a particular time and place – the sexually repressed, class-bound England of the thirties, moving uncertainly towards war – and the life of a particular human being, a fictive hybrid that includes much of the author himself’. – John Gray