Writing The Signal

I’ve wanted to write a novel about the Second World War for as long as I can remember. That novel is still somewhere in the future. But when the idea for The Signal started forming, it pulled me back further — back to the mud of Flanders, back to 1917, back to a war that feels, in some ways, more remote and more strange than the one that followed it.

The premise arrived almost complete: two men, separated by a century, talking on a field telephone. One of them knows how the story ends. The other is living it. And the question at the heart of it — the question I kept returning to as I wrote — was not the one you might expect.

It wasn’t can we change the past? It wasn’t even should we?

It was something quieter and, I think, more unsettling: if history had already been changed, would we know? And if we found ourselves knowing that history was about to go wrong — that the record we had inherited was about to be unmade — what would we do to put it back?

Most time-paradox stories are about prevention. Someone goes back, or reaches back, to stop something terrible from happening. The Signal runs the other way. Falcon isn’t trying to alter the past. He’s trying to preserve it. The paradox isn’t an accident to be avoided — it’s the mechanism the novel runs on. The bootstrap loop is the point. Falcon shapes history into the form history already took, because history took that form because Falcon shaped it. You can follow that circle as many times as you like. It doesn’t resolve. It was never supposed to.

The other thing I knew early on was that this couldn’t be a novel that glorified war. The Western Front doesn’t need glorifying, and Tommy Underhill doesn’t need a heroic narrative built around him — he already has one. His Victoria Cross citation exists. His actions on the night of 24–25 April 1918 are already in the record. The novel isn’t there to make him a hero. It’s there to show what it cost.

Getting the horror of the trenches right without turning the book into a catalogue of suffering was one of the harder balancing acts. The mud, the cold, the wire, the particular mundane brutality of a war that measured its gains in yards — all of that needed to be present, felt, real. But the story is about two men and a telephone line. The war is the context. It is not the subject. I wanted readers to feel the weight of the Western Front without losing the thread of what Tommy and Falcon are actually doing to each other across a century.

And that thread — that is where the real moral question lives. Not in the paradox mechanics, not in the historical detail, but in the simple fact that Falcon knows Tommy is going to die. He knows the date. He knows the circumstances. He reads the Victoria Cross citation and recognises his own fingerprints on the action it describes.

Does he try to save him? He cannot — the record is fixed, and Falcon is part of why it is fixed. But more than that: should he try? Tommy’s death is not meaningless. The men who lived because of how he died are real. The line that runs forward from Tommy through Emma through the generations to Falcon himself is real. The cost of inaction and the cost of action are both present, both legible, and neither one resolves into an answer the novel will hand you.

That’s the book I wanted to write. I hope it’s the book I wrote.