The Call of the Bugle

John Amos gives The Call of the Bugle the feel of a war story told from inside a haunted room. A correspondent wakes in a newsroom with brandy on the desk and bugles still ringing in his head, then drops back into the Crimea, where the Charge of the Light Brigade turns mud, horses, artillery, and smoke into a single brutal memory. The setup is strong because it keeps shifting the book between report and recollection. Amos uses letters, diaries, and the correspondent’s own account to widen the frame, so the novel feels layered without losing its forward motion. The battlefield scenes are vivid, but the quieter material often lands harder: Emily’s blanket, the crocuses on the bar, the smell of honeysuckle after rain, the strange unease in the cottage, the little objects that keep memory alive even when the people are gone.

That is where the book finds its best shape. It understands that war does not stop at the charge. It keeps working through grief, through love, through habit, through the places where the dead seem to linger. Dryden’s death hangs over the novel, but so do Jenny Farley, the correspondent’s drinking, Emily’s steadiness, and the old cottage full of mirrors, drawers, uniforms, and letters. Amos handles those pieces with enough patience to make the story feel inhabited. He wants the book to be big and elegiac and a little uncanny, and he mostly gets there. A few passages lean hard on their own importance, but the manuscript has enough emotional pressure to carry them. The result is a historical novel that feels earnest without being dry and romantic without going soft. It has the scale of war fiction and the odd intimacy of a ghost story. Readers who want something lean and purely tactical will probably lose patience with it. Readers who like historical fiction that blends battle, love, grief, and memory into one long echo should find this compelling.