Book's epigraph: "O God, our refuge, and our strength, look down in mercy on Thy people who cry to Thee..." Prayers after Low Mass.

Although there is ultimately very little fighting happening in it, Look Down in Mercy is first and foremost a war story, albeit one with the discreet but essential filigree of a gay love story weaving through the thread of its narrative.

The novel, divided in three parts and set over a few disastrous months of 1942 when the British forces are routed by the Japanese army as it invades Burma, is semi-autobiographical, which confers it an unmistakable authenticity.

Using a language that is at times a little clumsy but generally very serviceable, Baxter certainly doesn't shy away from the gruesome details of this slow and arduous journey through a country at war and a mind in turmoil. Here, human life is often of little value and even less meaning. Pain and suffering are not only omnipresent in the book, but are also overwhelming forces that brutally and ruthlessly destroy everything of beauty that comes in their way, like a blood-thristy invading army.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, none of the characters get a black story, which is one of the main defects of the book. Captain Tony Kent, the character through who's eyes most of the story is told, appears at first worthy of the admiration and utter devotion he inspires to his batman, Anson. But as the story unfolds, and his flaws are mercilessly exposed by his experience of war, he become less and less likeable, whereas the reader is not given an opportunity to learn much about the seemingly more likeable, and almost angelic, Anson, who is unfortunately but a mere shadow of a character.

Despite having a title inspired by a prayer, there is no sense of the religious in the book. There is also little sense of mercy in it. The book is imbued with that grim "kitchen sink" feel cherished by the era in which it was written (1951). It is a punch in the gut, but, while harrowing, it is also engrossing, despite the long descriptions and the minimal action.

UPDATE: Different endings
The UK and US versions have been given different endings. I first read the UK edition, which, in line with tropes of the time for books on this subject matter, is... "less optimistic", in contradiction, unsurprisingly, to the US version.

Spoiler

Kent commits suicide at the end of the UK version, although it feels like he was about to change his mind. He gets drunk in his hotel room, trying to make the thing look like an accident and, as he kneels on the window sill, vomits. As he watches "it falling into the night, spreading as it fell," he tries to straighten himself but the wood of the sill gives way and he falls to his death, crying out; "but not for mercy." These are the last words of the book.

In the US version, the last chapter of the UK version has been shortened (with a few details changed too, which makes me think this may have happened in the rest of the book as well) and Kent doesn't die. As he is about to commit suicide and sees his vomit precede him in his intended fall, he pushes himself back into the room and knocks himself unconscious.

An extra short chapter has been added to the edition: It is the following day, Kent is about to leave his room to catch his train as planned. He has been vomiting some more, which has proved cathartic, and he feels happiness at his lucky failure, a "near miracle" that the author describes as "inevitable" (though Kent is not aware of that, we are told), and, after pondering his luck, that he has to "go on living and be with Anson."

This is clearly a much more hopeful ending. It is however marred by the intrusion, in that pondering Kent does, of a veiled reference to religion and religious morality. "But mingled with this wonderment was a frustrating sense of gratitude, frustrating because he could not image to whom he should be grateful. And somehow connected with this puzzlement [...] was a cold thought that seemed to warn him that this knowledge was of vital importance. That without it he was, and would always be, incapable of experiencing any happiness except in its crudest and most ephemeral form." He pushes that thought aside, though, and "resolve[s] to try and be brave and to try and be good; to do more, he told himself, was not in his power."

Oddly the US ending seems more explicitly in line with the blurb of the UK edition than that edition itself, which, somewhat obtusely, describes the book as "an allegory of man's everlasting inhumanity to man, of the sadness of existence without faith, of the futility of self-centredness, of the implicity of us all in everything that happens."

In one version Kent looks down and finds mercy, in the other he doesn't. For all its expected yankee optimism, it feels like the US version is the better one, with a more complex ending. Or at least is it the one that proves more humane and more free of the negative judgemental outlook of the time at which it was published, and, as a result, that much more acceptable to modern readers.