Dying Days by Anthony Byrt

Anthony Byrt’s Dying Days is an assured and atmospheric espionage novel set in Trieste in May 1945, when the end of the Second World War has not brought peace so much as a dangerous rearrangement of power. Tito’s Yugoslav Army and Allied forces have reached a tense standoff in the city. Fascists, collaborators and suspected enemies are disappearing. The Allies are reluctant to be drawn into another conflict, but rumours that New Zealand soldiers may be among the missing force a response.

Into this uncertainty, Byrt places a British MI6 agent and a New Zealand intelligence officer, both charged with finding out what has happened, and both operating in a city where every conversation may conceal another loyalty. Their investigation moves through military bureaucracy, partisan networks, wealthy local families and a traumatised population trying to survive the transition from one occupation to another. The result is not a conventional wartime adventure, but a story about the murky aftermath of victory, when moral clarity begins to collapse almost as soon as the fighting stops.

Byrt handles this historical material with confidence. Trieste is particularly well realised, not as a picturesque European setting but as a contested borderland where language, ideology, class and memory all carry danger. The city’s divisions give the novel its tension. Nobody moves through it innocently. The characters must interpret rumours, silences and half-truths in a place where the wrong assumption can be fatal. This makes the espionage element feel less like genre decoration than an appropriate form for the subject. Intelligence work, here, is an exercise in doubt.

The novel’s New Zealand dimension is one of its most interesting features. Fiction about the Second World War often returns to familiar centres of power, but Dying Days shifts attention towards the uneasy position of soldiers and officers from the edge of empire, present at the end of one conflict and watching the shape of the next emerge. Byrt is alert to the compromised nature of Allied authority. The winners of the war do not remain uncomplicated heroes for long.

The prose is controlled and evocative, with an eye for atmosphere and a strong sense of period detail. Byrt’s background as a critic and nonfiction writer can be felt in the density of observation and the care with which historical forces are arranged. At times, however, that complexity asks a good deal of the reader. The plot is intricate, and there are moments when the shifting alliances and political pressures require close attention. Some readers may find the emotional lives of the characters slightly cooler than the historical setting itself.

Even so, Dying Days is a compelling debut. Its strength lies in refusing to make the end of war simple. Byrt understands that the final days of one catastrophe can contain the beginnings of another, and that truth in such circumstances is rarely clean. This is a thoughtful, tense and intelligent thriller about violence, memory and the stories nations tell themselves once the guns have quietened.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Affirm Press