How Many Miles to Babylon?

Alec Moore is the first-person narrator and tragic protagonist of Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon (1974). He’s a young Anglo-Irish Protestant from a privileged but emotionally barren Big House background. Sensitive, introspective, and artistically inclined, Alec stands out as an outsider in both his own class and the harsh realities of the First World War trenches. The novel begins with Alec awaiting execution in a military cell, and it unfolds as he reflects on the events that led him to this moment.

Alec's journey transitions from a sheltered adolescence to a moral awakening and ultimately to quiet, dignified acceptance. As a boy, he forms a rare, genuine friendship with Jerry Crowe, the son of a Catholic tenant, challenging the strict class boundaries imposed by his mother. When they both enlist and are sent to the Western Front, Alec leverages his officer’s position to protect Jerry, notably by securing him a relatively safe role as a runner. When Jerry goes absent without leave to look for his missing father and faces a death sentence, Alec takes matters into his own hands and shoots him rather than let a firing squad execute him. This act of mercy determines Alec's own fate.

Alec's key traits include an emotional restraint that hides deep loyalty, a passive resistance to authority, and a struggle to meet the expectations imposed by class and military rank. He doesn’t fit neatly into the roles of hero or coward — his final act is both a defiance and a gesture of love.

Alec's father is a minor yet quietly important character in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon (1974). He is a Protestant Anglo-Irish landlord who lives in the Big House, exuding a sense of detached gentility. Emotionally distant from his son Alec's upbringing, he remains largely passive under the control of his domineering wife. Although he is cultured and not unkind—sharing brief, warm moments with Alec—he fails to step in for his son or assert any paternal authority against his wife's cold manipulation. His most significant action may be his inaction: when Alec's mother forbids his friendship with Jerry Crowe due to class differences, Alec's father doesn't object, letting her wishes go uncontested. He symbolizes the weary, ineffective Anglo-Irish gentry—men who prefer retreating into drink, books, or silence instead of confronting a changing Ireland or their own families. His character remains static throughout the novel; he neither grows nor declines noticeably, serving instead as a mirror to reflect the emotional emptiness of Alec's home life. This helps explain why Alec looks for genuine human connection beyond the Big House. His passivity quietly criticizes a class that is unwilling or unable to adapt, actively love, or protect what truly matters.

Alec's mother is a deeply complex and morally ambiguous character in How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnston. As a cold and commanding Anglo-Irish aristocrat, she rules the Big House with an iron fist, shaping—and ultimately distorting—her son Alec's emotional landscape. Her most defining trait is a possessive, stifling love for Alec that she disguises as protection but ultimately serves as control. From the novel's start, she seeks to isolate him from the outside world, notably by orchestrating the end of his friendship with Jerry Crowe, a local Catholic boy she views as socially and racially inferior. Upon discovering their bond, she confronts Alec with chilling anger and demands he promise to sever the friendship, showcasing her ability to use maternal authority as a weapon.

Her relationship with Alec's father is marked by mutual disdain and emotional detachment; she regards him as unimportant, and the frigid atmosphere of their home mirrors their empty marriage. Her character does not experience growth or redemption—she remains inflexible and self-centered throughout. She encourages Alec to enlist in World War One partly to distance him from Jerry and partly due to class obligations, showing little regard for the mortal peril she places him in. This willingness to sacrifice her son's life to maintain social order highlights her profound moral failure. She represents the cruelty and insularity of the waning Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and her influence lingers over every decision Alec makes, even in the trenches.

Bennett is a secondary but thematically important character in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon (1974), a World War I novel that mainly takes place in an Irish regiment on the Western Front. He primarily serves as a symbol of institutional cruelty, representing the rigid, class-based military hierarchy that the novel critiques.

As a fellow officer, Bennett openly disdains Alec Moore's unlikely friendship with the enlisted man Jerry Crowe. While Alec is introspective and hesitant to enforce social boundaries, Bennett is the one who upholds them—sneering, conventional, and comfortable using the unwritten rules of rank and class as tools of oppression. He reports Alec's friendship with Jerry to the commanding officers, committing a petty act of betrayal that triggers the sequence of events leading to Jerry's court-martial and execution for desertion. In this way, Bennett is not depicted as a complex villain but more as a mundane, bureaucratic obstacle: a man so shaped by his class biases that he can't imagine friendship transcending social lines.

His character arc is essentially flat—he experiences no growth or change—which Johnston emphasizes intentionally. Bennett embodies the static, unquestioning world that ultimately ruins both Alec and Jerry. His main traits include conformity, snobbery, and moral cowardice disguised as propriety. Although he appears in relatively few scenes, his denunciation of Alec carries significant narrative weight, making him a catalyst for the novel's tragic ending.

Captain Barry is a minor but thematically important authority figure in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?. He serves as the commanding officer who oversees the court martial and execution of Alec Moore. Barry embodies the impersonal and procedural nature of the British Army, bound by military law, which sharply contrasts with the human connections celebrated throughout the novel. He isn't depicted as a sadist; instead, his threat comes from his bureaucratic detachment. He processes Alec's fate with the cold efficiency of someone who has put duty above conscience. During the court martial scenes, he maintains formal correctness, never recognizing Alec as an individual, which highlights Johnston's critique of how institutions dehumanize those entangled in them. Barry also interacts with Major Glendinning, whose moral compromises become more apparent against Barry's unwavering adherence to military hierarchy. Barry doesn’t evolve or develop psychologically; he remains deliberately flat, serving as a structural device that represents the rigid wall of class and military power that ultimately brings ruin to both Alec and Jerry. His role, though brief, is crucial: it is his authority that signs the death warrant, making him the means through which the novel's tragic ending unfolds. In this way, Captain Barry embodies Johnston's broader criticism of a system that sacrifices young men—across class lines—to the indifferent machinery of war and empire.

Jerry Crowe is a working-class Irish soldier and the emotional core of Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974). Stationed on the Western Front during World War One, he narrates his own story in a way that's framed by Alec's perspective, but Jerry's presence is what drives every moral conflict in the narrative. Growing up in poverty on the Moore estate, Jerry is a skilled horseman with quiet dignity who forms an unlikely yet sincere friendship with the Anglo-Irish Alec Moore during their childhood. This cross-class bond is both the novel's central relationship and a significant transgression.

Jerry enlists not out of a sense of patriotism but to search for his father, who has gone missing at the front — a motivation born from loyalty to family rather than ideology. In the trenches, he is practical, brave, and sardonic, using dry wit to cut through the absurdity of military hierarchy. When he goes absent without leave to find his father's body, he faces a court-martial and a death sentence. His story culminates in execution, carried out by Alec himself — a heartbreaking act that frames the entire novel and critiques the class system, imperial war, and the institutions that strip away individual humanity.

Jerry embodies loyalty, self-control, and a clear-eyed view of his social position. He neither idealizes his friendship with Alec nor resents its boundaries; he simply embraces it fully, making his death an even sharper indictment of the world that ultimately destroys him.

Major Glendinning is the commanding officer of the British Army unit in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974). He represents institutional authority and military power rooted in class. Rather than being a fully developed character, he acts more like a structural force — the embodiment of the officer class — and his actions propel the novel toward its tragic climax.

Glendinning is cold, exacting, and strictly adheres to rules. He shows little interest in the men under his command as individuals; his focus is on rank, order, and maintaining the social hierarchies that the war is supposedly meant to defend. When Jerry Crowe goes AWOL to look for his missing father, Glendinning quickly moves to have him court-martialed and sentenced to death by firing squad. He further amplifies the cruelty by ordering Alec Moore — Jerry's closest friend and a fellow officer — to execute him personally, a command that serves as both punishment and a test of Alec's loyalty to the system over his friend.

Glendinning's character arc is largely static: he starts and finishes as an instrument of power. Yet his rigidity highlights the novel's main argument — that class and military hierarchy work together to undermine genuine human connections. His disdain for the friendship between the Anglo-Irish officer Alec and the working-class Jerry is evident in every interaction, making him the novel's most potent symbol of the social order that sends young men to their deaths and then punishes them for trying to maintain their humanity.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon, family serves less as a refuge and more as a place of quiet devastation. Alec Moore's household is marked not by warmth but by a calculated coldness: his mother, Alicia, views him as a tool for her dynastic ambitions rather than as her son, maintaining an emotional distance that feels almost architecturally precise. Her insistence that Alec only associate with those of his own class goes beyond snobbery—it represents a form of ownership, a way to ensure he remains entirely under her control. In contrast, his father is a peripheral, defeated figure whose gentleness lacks authority; he cannot counterbalance Alicia's dominance, and his passivity makes him complicit in Alec's loneliness.

The friendship between Alec and Jerry Crowe highlights the family's cruelty most clearly. When Alicia learns of their cross-class bond, her reaction is immediate and punishing. It's clear to the reader that her fear lies not in impropriety but in losing her control. Alec's struggle to fully embrace Jerry as a friend—or to save him later—is directly linked to the conditioning his family has imposed on him since childhood.

Johnston also employs the Big House setting as a physical metaphor for the family's emotional state: grand, cold, and slowly crumbling. The house does not shelter its inhabitants; it confines them. Alec narrates from a military cell while awaiting execution, and this retrospective structure prompts readers to see that the family home was always, in its own way, another type of cell. In this novel, blood ties do not offer protection—they dictate fate.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon, fate isn't so much a dramatic twist of destiny as it is a slow, suffocating inevitability shaped by class, war, and the silence of those in power. The novel opens with Alec Moore writing from a military prison cell, awaiting execution, making it clear from the start that nothing can change the outcome. Every friendship, every act of loyalty, every small rebellion against social norms is already overshadowed by the reader's awareness of the impending doom, lending even the most mundane moments a sense of inevitable tragedy.

The bond between Alec and Jerry Crowe serves as the novel's key exploration of whether human will can outsmart fate. Their friendship, which defies the strict divide between Anglo-Irish gentry and Catholic tenant farmer, feels vibrant and rebellious in the flashbacks of their boyhood days spent fishing and riding. Yet Johnston illustrates that the societal forces around them — Alec's cold, controlling mother and the unspoken rules of the Big House — have already determined the value of their connection. When the First World War breaks out, it doesn’t forge their fate but rather quickens it; the trenches act as a more efficient means of fulfilling what Anglo-Irish society had already set in motion.

Jerry's desertion to find his missing father, along with Alec's choice to shoot him rather than let the military execute him cruelly, crystallizes the novel's fatalistic theme: the only freedom either man has is in the manner of their destruction, not in avoiding it altogether. Alec's act of mercy becomes an acknowledgment of a fate that neither of them can escape. The nursery-rhyme title — with its inquiry about distance and darkness — lingers throughout the novel as a haunting motif for journeys that can be measured but never truly altered.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon, the friendship between Alec Moore, an Anglo-Irish officer, and Jerry Crowe, a working-class Irish soldier, serves as the novel's moral and emotional heart—and its central impossibility. They first meet as boys in the fields near Alec's estate, a space outside the rigid class boundaries of the Big House, where their bond develops almost without words, through shared wandering and a comfort neither finds elsewhere. Johnston makes it clear from the outset that their friendship is transgressive: Alec's mother forbids it with cold precision, viewing it as a contamination of rank rather than a mere boyhood attachment.

Once both men find themselves in the trenches of the First World War, their friendship faces the same hierarchical pressures that have always loomed over it—now formalized by military rank. Alec is an officer; Jerry is not. The physical distance between their billets reflects the social gap their world enforces, yet they continue to seek one another out in secret moments, sharing cigarettes and silence in ways that unsettle the other soldiers.

The friendship reaches a breaking point when Jerry deserts to look for his missing father. Alec’s choice to help him, and ultimately to shoot him before the firing squad can, is framed not as betrayal but as the only kind of loyalty the system allows. Johnston uses this act to suggest that true friendship, in a world shaped by class and war, can only endure as a private, ultimately tragic, gesture. The miles to Babylon represent the gap between what the two men feel and what their world will allow.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon, loyalty serves both as a source of strength and as a deadly trap, most vividly illustrated in the friendship between Alec Moore, an Anglo-Irish officer, and Jerry Crowe, an Irish enlisted man. Their connection transcends the barriers imposed by the Edwardian class system and the machinery of the First World War, and Johnston uses this crossing to explore the true cost of loyalty.

Their friendship is grounded in a deep, almost unspoken intimacy formed during childhood rides across the Moore estate. This pastoral memory recurs throughout the story — with images of horses, open land, and the freedom that existed before rank — and Alec mentally revisits it whenever the pressures of the trenches mount. This idyllic past is not just a longing for simpler times; it represents the only relationship in Alec's life that remains untouched by his mother's calculating social ambitions or his father's emotional distance.

When Jerry goes absent without leave to search for his father, Alec hides this fact, a choice that is less impulsive and more the inevitable result of every decision he has made since joining the army. His loyalty to Jerry is the sole principle he has held onto despite institutional pressure. However, the army interprets private loyalty as public betrayal: Alec is ordered to lead Jerry's firing squad, and his refusal — shooting Jerry himself to spare him the humiliation — becomes both the most loyal and the most defiant act in the novel.

Johnston presents the entire story as Alec's memoir written in his prison cell on the eve of his execution. This retrospective format ensures that loyalty is constantly weighed against its consequences, never idealized. The friendship fails to save either man; it simply remains the only thing Alec believes is worth being loyal to.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon, identity is constantly under threat — shaped by class, loyalty, and the harsh realities of war, yet remaining intensely personal in ways that resist outside influences.

From the start, Alec Moore's sense of self is fragmented. He narrates his story from a military prison cell while awaiting execution, viewing his life as a failed quest to uncover his true identity beneath the roles imposed on him by others. His Anglo-Irish Protestant background gives him a social identity that feels alien: his mother projects an aristocratic coldness onto him, treating it as an inheritance, while his gentle, ineffective father embodies a retreat into personal pleasure that Alec both admires and despises. Neither of these models feels right for him.

His friendship with Jerry Crowe, the son of a Catholic tenant farmer, becomes the novel's main exploration of identity. Their bond, formed in childhood through shared rides and silences, transcends societal boundaries. For Alec, Jerry represents an authenticity he struggles to claim for himself; for Jerry, Alec is both a friend and a symbol of the class that owns his family's land. Johnston avoids romanticizing their disparity: each young man sees a version of the other that is partly colored by their own projections.

On the Western Front, the class distinctions fade — uniforms erase the visible markers of rank — yet this setting amplifies the identity crisis. Alec's position among officers reveals their casual cruelty, a trait he cannot embrace; his loyalty to Jerry further alienates him. When he ultimately chooses to help Jerry desert instead of following military orders, it’s less an act of heroism and more a fleeting moment where his inner and outer selves align — a brief coherence that the firing squad will soon obliterate.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?, loss and grief aren’t expressed through overt mourning; instead, they are woven into the novel's retrospective structure. Alec Moore narrates from a military prison cell, awaiting execution, which means that each memory he shares is already tinged with the inevitability of loss. The elegiac tone is set even before any events unfold.

The friendship between Alec and Jerry Crowe forms the emotional heart of the novel, and its unraveling becomes the main source of grief. Their connection, developed in the fields of an Anglo-Irish estate, transcends class divisions that both families try to uphold. Alec's distant, socially ambitious mother forbids their friendship because she instinctively understands its significance to him. Her ban is a form of anticipatory grief, a practice run for the greater severance that is bound to happen.

The Western Front transforms loss into a tangible environment. Men vanish with alarming regularity — swallowed by mud, silence, or bureaucratic casualty reports — and Johnston depicts this not through dramatic battle scenes but through the monotonous cycle of absence. Jerry’s disappearance into no-man's-land in search of his missing father deepens the grief across generations: a son risking everything to find a father who is almost certainly gone.

The novel’s most gut-wrenching moment occurs at the end, when Alec is ordered to carry out Jerry's execution. This act merges friendship, duty, and mourning into one instant, positioning Alec as both the executor and the primary mourner of this loss. His steady, first-person narration throughout avoids any sense of closure, implying that some grief simply must be borne, unresolved, until the end of one’s life.

In Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?, social class isn't just a backdrop; it's the driving force that decides who survives and who doesn't. The novel's key friendship between Alec Moore, the son of Anglo-Irish gentry, and Jerry Crowe, a tenant farmer's son, is rooted in a connection the adult world disapproves of. Their childhood bond forms in the fields and bogs of the Moore estate — a place where class lines temporarily blur — yet the very landscape reinforces inequality: Alec lives in the Big House while Jerry's family struggles to make a living from the land beneath it.

Alec's mother, Alicia, serves as the novel's most relentless enforcer of class distinctions. Her disdain for Jerry has nothing to do with his character; it's solely about his background. She manipulates Alec's enlistment partly to end the friendship, using the war as a tool of social separation. The army, in turn, mirrors civilian class structures in uniform: Alec is automatically made an officer, while Jerry serves as a private. The physical and symbolic gap between officers' quarters and enlisted men's barracks reflects the distance between the Big House and the cottage.

The tragedy unfolds when Jerry deserts to find his missing father and is sentenced to death. Alec, as an officer, is ordered to carry out the execution — a moment that starkly illustrates how privilege wields power over the underprivileged. Alec's final act of shooting Jerry himself, to save him from a botched firing squad, serves as both an act of mercy and a harsh critique: the most personal violence in the novel is one that the class system made unavoidable.

Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon employs the First World War not merely as a backdrop but as a driving force—the war doesn’t merely catalyze the central tragedy; it dismantles every social illusion that could have prevented it. The war’s effects resonate on multiple levels, and Johnston skillfully illustrates how each one erodes something irreplaceable.

The clearest indicator of war's devastation is the friendship between Alec Moore and Jerry Crowe. Their connection, built in the fields and stables of the Anglo-Irish estate, withstands class differences and parental disapproval—until the army envelops both men and reinstates the very hierarchy their friendship had quietly resisted. The officer's uniform that Alec dons becomes a tool for war’s cruelest outcome: he is commanded to supervise Jerry's execution for desertion, transforming the one relationship that brought meaning to his life into the act that ultimately takes it.

Johnston presents the war's ramifications through Alec's retrospective narration from a cell, where he awaits his own execution for shooting Jerry instead of allowing the firing squad to do so. This structural choice—telling the story entirely in the past tense from a terminal present—casts a shadow over every small moment of their friendship, hinting at what the war will ultimately make of it. The nursery rhyme in the title, with its unanswerable question about distance and darkness, runs throughout the novel as a motif for how war obliterates futures: the narrative insists that no one ever arrives anywhere safely.

Even the landscape plays a role. The Irish fields that once symbolized potential transform into the Belgian mud that engulfs both Jerry's bravery and Alec's final act of loyalty, leaving nothing whole.