29 OCTOBER 1994, Page 27

That it is written from such an angle is what

makes the book passionate and per- sonal, a report from the front line, with the excitable young narrator bunging down everything that happens, in the present tense for maximum immediacy, as though exuberance were all that were needed to make a book. Even whilst enjoying it, I wished that Mr Fallowell had laid aside the mask of a callow narrator, especially in the pages of naive rumination about Russia, and chipped in some reflexions and analy- sis from his own mature viewpoint.