The Chasm

Novel (316 pages, 78,500 words)

This was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1947 at 9/6 with an initial print run of 15,000. It was reprinted in 1951 at 5/- with another print run of 15,000. A paperback came out in 1952 with a print run of 60,000. These were much larger runs than Canning had enjoyed before. An American edition was published by M.S.Mill in 1947, and an American paperback in the mid 1950s. The film rights were sold to Columbia before publication, and there were plans to film it in Nettlefold Studios under the title "Monte Falcone" announced in 1946, but the plans seem to have been abandoned and no film was ever made.

It was the first book Canning wrote after the war, and followed a four-year gap since Green Battlefield in 1943. It is a halfway house between the novels he had written in the thirties and the thrillers that would become his stock-in-trade in the fifties, mainly a tragic love story, but with thriller elements.

In a publicity handout from 1952, he describes how he came to write it.

The idea for The Chasm first came to me in August 1944, during the battle of Florence. I was acting as battery observation officer in the top floor of a battered block of flats on the Via Bolognese at the north of the city. It was a hot afternoon and I was lying full length on a dusty divan watching the fall of shot through the slats of the window blind when a British officer came into the room behind me. He was a relief for another officer of another regiment who had been sharing the room with me. I hadn’t seen him before.

He stood for a moment in the half-light of the room and then came over and greeted me, not by my own name but by another. I explained that he had mistaken me for someone else. We shared the room for several days and became pretty intimate and he told me some of his story. War-strain and unhappiness at being let down by a girl at home had made a mess of his nerves and he was constantly imagining that he saw his old—and dead—war friends. He was obviously a psycho-neurotic case and his trouble made a profound impression on me.

Later a view from the Florence-Forli road gave me the setting for the story working in my mind. From high up in the road over the Apennines I used to look down in winter into a vast, remote bowl. Far away on the lip of the bowl was the thin smoke of a small town. The remoteness and magic of the bowl fascinated me and one day I explored it … and found the places which in the story became Cappa and Montefalcone.

The book is dedicated "To C.J.B.M., W.D.S, and P.F.C." One presumes these are wartime colleagues, and one of them is probably the shell-shocked officer he met in Florence, though nothing can be said for certain.

The main character is Edward Burgess, a discharged and rather shell-shocked officer now working in Italy as an architect for UNRRA, enjoying a week of sick leave in Florence in February 1947. He keeps seeing people he thinks he knows. He remembers a pre-war visit with some British university friends, and sees a man who reminds him strongly of one of them, William Martel, last seen fifteen years ago, but the man seems to be an Italian art dealer with a badly burned face.

Burgess makes a nostalgic journey into the mountains. He meets a young woman, Gemma, and a boy driving an oxcart across a rickety bridge over a ravine. The bridge collapses, trapping them on the far side, so Burgess must stay in their village until the bridge is mended.

He is introduced to the local landowner, Signor Riccioni, who turns out to be the same art dealer he met in Florence, and is now definitely recognised as Martel. But Martel/Riccioni is a Nazi collaborator hiding in Italy and wanted for treason. Riccioni, realising he has been recognised, is determined to have Burgess killed before he can leave the village and report his whereabouts, and calls on the services of Bista, Gemma's fiancé. Meanwhile Burgess has fallen in love with Gemma. There is a final confrontation at the chasm, and an indeterminate ending.

First edition 1947	Spanish translation 1948	H & S paperback 1952
1960 paperback	US paperback	Index of characters, locations and themes in The Chasm