Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

This account of Mowat’s journey through postwar Europe is in many ways
a great disappointment, despite its accessible style and the fascinating
characters encountered along the way. Neither travelogue nor war memoir,
it pays homage to both genres, with flashbacks to the author’s
military service mixing, at times uneasily, with a kaleidoscope of
peacetime images. Several themes pervade the text and help unify the
staccato, rambling narrative—antimilitarism, antifascism, and
environmentalism, for example—but none are especially novel,
particularly to Mowat devotees. Despite individual vignettes, postwar
Europe here remains a vaguely impenetrable enigma from which the
“veils of time,” to borrow from Mowat’s foreword, stubbornly
refuse to lift.

Mowat returned to Europe in 1953 with his wife, Frances, in preparation
for writing The Regiment (1955). The couple first traveled to England,
where they purchased a car, and then set out for Italy, where Mowat and
his army comrades had battled German paratroopers less than a decade
before. The experiences along the way—in an English brewery, a French
mountain village, an Alpine hostel—are entertaining but rarely
compelling; at times, in fact, they are downright dull. Flashes of
sardonic wit and literary prowess do surface. Portofino, for
example—postwar playground of the idle rich—is lampooned with
commendable style. Its picturesque streets, writes Mowat, were
“encrusted with boutiques and filled with glittering automobiles and
semi-naked, glistening millionaires of several sexes.” Such passages
occur all too rarely, however, enlivening an ordinary narrative, but in
no way rescuing it.

As a casual read, Aftermath will not disappoint, and perhaps that was
Mowat’s purpose after all, to provide (as the dedication suggests)
“glimpses of a world that was.” But the brief foreword, indeed the
book’s entire structure, suggests a more ambitious effort—an effort
that, in his words, “come[s] close to overleaping time and penetrating
the obscurity.” In this, it clearly fails. Aftermath says little about
war or postwar that has not been said elsewhere with equal or greater
conviction, and certainly with greater substance. A light book about
serious themes, it is by turns preachy, moralistic, and superficial. The
“obscurity” remains. Farley Mowat has done—and will do—much
better.