How Patch and Rook solved five different storytelling problems in Invasion

I recently got a review on Amazon that I’d been expecting ever since I started writing Invasion. The reviewer commented, “Did you need SAS to get involved? One, yes, I can see that. But three?”

It’s a fair question in a book deliberately centred on Canadian resistance.

In reality, it has very little to do with wanting more SAS characters in the book (despite me being British) and a lot to do with the architecture of the book.

Ash, the central protagonist (if any character can lay claim to that role in a book with such a large ensemble cast), is British (which I’ll deal with in a separate article) and ex-SAS. So, once he entered the war, I had to solve several problems.

It gave Ash an established team

The first was, who could he plausibly operate alongside?

The obvious answer would have been to give him a Canadian team. But even with Veldman and Sam vouching for Ash, a pre-existing team of competent soldiers that suddenly gets a retired foreign officer pushed on them would not automatically embrace him as their commander. He doesn’t know them, they don’t know him, their training and doctrine are different, and at his age, after five years away from ‘the life,’ they’d probably run rings around “the old man” physically.

So, there’d be scene after scene where they assess and initially distrust one another, the team questions his orders, they train together, establish roles, learn each other’s rhythms, and eventually, maybe, become a fully functioning unit.

That could be a book in itself, and I simply didn’t have the real estate for that. Invasion had enough background to establish—Canadian command, Red Maple, occupation forces, federal politics, Alberta, the Compact, Operation Faithless Jack—without tracking Ash’s onboarding across ten chapters.

So, instead, I gave Ash a team that would work well with him with little preparation. By bringing Patch and Rook into the story, all that Forming-Storming-Norming cycle has already happened, and they can get to Performing fairly quickly. They know how Ash thinks; he knows their capabilities; and nobody needs to explain who watches the rear, who handles signals, or who spots the thing the others missed.

It allowed Ash to be in the CAF without being CAF

Ash’s character is an outsider. He is someone who has not come up through Red Maple. He questions it and pushes back against it. That is part of the tension between him, Sam, and Veldman.

But I needed Ash to be part of the war. Veldman takes him on because of his background and skills, despite the inconvenient fact that he has no standing whatsoever in the CAF—the two of them even muse whether they might be court-martialled together for the little charade they concoct.

Patch and Rook also solve an authority problem. Ash can lead them because that relationship already exists. He cannot simply start commanding Canadian soldiers because the plot says he’s very good at warfare. So, Veldman and Kincaid remain the Canadian chain of command, and Ash remains an attached outsider with a very particular set of skills.

Ash’s SAS team pushes his past into the present

Another interesting part of the Ash-Patch-Rook dynamic is that their appearance marks the crossing of the final boundary from Richard Rowe back to Major Ashcombe.

Ash has spent five years living under his assumed identity as Richard Rowe. As the U.S. provocations mount, he continues trying to exist as Rowe. His conversation with Rawdon starts to pull him back into military life, and Veldman completes that transition. At the end of their meeting, Ash is a soldier once more.

But then, moments later, he meets Patch and Rook, and he is not just any soldier. He is Alexander Ashcombe, SAS officer.

And yet, Patch and Rook don’t welcome him with open arms. They buried an empty coffin. For five years, they mourned their friend and commander. Rook still struggles to forgive the deception. Nomad is dead.

The old team can never actually be restored. So, the team provides both nostalgia and damage simultaneously. From a plotting perspective, Patch and Rook are a shortcut. From Ash’s perspective, however, they are anything but.

Ironically, the easiest possible operational team is also the hardest team emotionally for Ash.

The bit I’m embarrassed to admit

There was one final advantage, which I would love to pretend was the product of sophisticated narrative architecture.

On a personal level, writing Invasion meant I was constantly switching between men and women, Canadians, Americans, Europeans, and military personnel from multiple services. I spent months perpetually recalibrating vocabulary, rhythm, cultural assumptions, and humour as I wrote.

Ash, Patch, and Rook are British.

So am I.

I don't have to calibrate them. I know how these three men take the piss out of one another. I know what they’ll leave unsaid, what they’ll make a joke about, and what they absolutely won’t.

The danger, of course, is indulging that familiarity at everyone else's expense, so the trick is using it without allowing the British characters to colonize the Canadian novel.

So, did I need three SAS soldiers in a Canadian war novel?

Strictly speaking, no. Writers rarely need any particular solution.

But once I knew what problems I had to solve—Ash’s authority, the pace of the story, his outsider relationship with the CAF, continuity with his past, and the emotional cost of becoming Alexander Ashcombe again—Patch and Rook stopped looking like two extra British soldiers.

They became the cheapest piece of narrative infrastructure in the book.