During the summer of 1940 Hitler attempted to destroy the RAF so as to leave the skies clear for an invasion of Britain across the English Channel. He failed. In the early fall he decided instead to launch a sustained campaign of night bombing, to demoralize the British people and destroy as much of their heavy industry as he could. London took the brunt of it, and those few weeks live on in the British imagination as "The Blitz." Not least of the myths of the Blitz is the story of the cheery unflappable defiance shown by ordinary Londoners toward the German bombers who rained down death and destruction on them night after pitiless night.

There is plenty of English unflappability, though of the suave rather than the cheery variety, in what became the first major literary success of the now dimly remembered Nigel Balchin. Darkness Falls from the Air—the title is a negation of Thomas Nashe's "brightness" line, recently employed by Jay McInerney—was published in 1942, and tells in first-person the melancholy Blitz story of an urbane young man called Bill Serratt. A civil servant in what sounds like Beaverbrook's Ministry of War, Bill's days are spent deftly navigating bureaucratic reefs of venality, stupidity, and cowardice, while nights he spends drinking with his wife, Marcia. Most nights, that is. Some nights Marcia spends with her lover, a writer called Stephen.

This is a situation Bill wearily tolerates, for he understands that the only way Marcia will get the infatuation out of her system is by indulging it. Everybody is terribly grown-up about this. Bill and Marcia are old friends of Stephen and his wife, Peggy. Marcia at one point tells Bill: "'I can quite understand Peggy not minding if I sleep with Stephen. But what I can't understand is that she can't understand that I can understand it.'"

The problem is Stephen, who over-dramatizes and overcomplicates what Bill knows to be a straightforward case of sex. Here are Stephen and Bill together:

Stephen smiled. "It's a damned presumptuous thing to say," he said, pushing his glass forward. "But in some ways—in some ways mark you—you carry your deliberate misunderstanding of Marcia dangerously far."

"I agree." I said.

"You do?"

"I agree that it's a damned presumptuous thing to say," I said.

This tale of a triangle unfolds against a backdrop of allying bombs and burning buildings. The tone in which Bill recounts it is as dry as the multitudes of cocktails consumed by these people every evening. One night of particular horror—the entire East End, it seems, including the river, is blazing out of control and turning the sky red—is described as being "distinctly rough out there." Another night a small incendiary bomb lands a few feet away from Bill and Marcia, after Marcia decides they must leave the bar and "see how the war's getting on." The bomb is quickly extinguished. Marcia remarks that it was "a feeble little bomb," and Bill says "it didn't get much of a chance." Marcia says she "felt quite sorry for it in a way."

None of this is comic. Witty, yes, not comic. These are characters, not caricatures. Bill and Marcia, and to an extent Stephen, are dealing with a potentially terminal marital crisis. Bill's work, despite all the bureaucratic absurdities he encounters, is no less serious. It's only the way they talk about things that makes it all shimmer with delicious understatement: "I think it's rather important to win this war," says one, and the reply comes: "Oh well, we always do win things. " Who are these pukka Brits? Educated posh. Eton and Christchurch.

We move toward the finale, where Balchin does a quietly brilliant thing. The novel thus far has been a subtle triumph of mature modernism, these godless forties London sophisticates dealing without cant, without romanticism of any shade at all—apart from Stephen, but with an ethic, rather, of tentative pragmatism—with an immensely tricky problem in the area of marriage and sex; and in back are the falling bombs and the fact of war. So how to draw together, in a novel of 190 pages, with a cast, basically, of three, a love story and a war story?

That is how. Bill and Marcia solve their Stephen problem. Their own love affair—their marriage, that is—properly resumes. Marcia takes a job in a care center in the East End. One night the center is destroyed by a bomb. Bill runs, cabs, spiels his way through reeling, apocalyptic, bombed-out London. He crawls into the rubble of the building. He finds Marcia trapped under a beam. She's done for. She's still alive, just. But it hurts, Bill, it hurts.

Bill crawls out. In short order he appropriates morphia and syringe, and crawls back in again. Shoots her up, hills the pain. Kills her. Crawls out again. Sublime act of love in a random, destructive, though not entirely meaningless world; but oh, the irony, the pathos of it all!