An insightful, engrossing WW2 story

Chris Cleave's work on wartime leaves you thinking.

Chris Cleave PHOTO: SUPPLIED
Chris Cleave PHOTO: SUPPLIED

EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN
Chris Cleave
Hachette

Reviewed by RACHEL GURNEY 

Chris Cleave has added to the list of British authors who have recently written novels involving World War 2 (Kate Atkinson with Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and Where My Heart Used To Beat by Sebastian Faulks) with Everyone Brave Is Forgiven.

As with most stories, the action is concentrated on a few individuals.

Mary North hails from Pimlico, an affluent London suburb relatively untouched during the war, and her father is an MP. She signs up on the day war is declared, thinking she might become a spy, but is assigned as a teacher.

Soon all the children are evacuated to the country but a few outcasts, ‘‘the afflicted and blacks'', were returned to London, as the country ‘‘yokels were allowed to pick the blonds''. The irony of this is not lost on Mary (who also notes that the Regent's Park Zoo was fully evacuated before the children) and she stays in London to teach them, meeting Tom Shaw, who is in the Education Authority, and through him, his friend Alistair Heath, a curator at the Tate, who signs up and fights in France and Malta. Mary also ends up driving ambulances with her good friend Hilda Appleby.

Life is not easy for any of the four as the war impacts on their daily lives, their values and morals, and their relationships with friends, family, colleagues and strangers. My review copy came in a miniature suitcase with replicas of a ration book, a luggage tag, an ID card and a real jar of blackberry jam. The jam features in the book, but even its fate is unexpected.

I have read a previous book by Cleave, Gold, about Olympic athletes. He can portray what is going on in anyone's head, from a soldier to a butler, an MP's wife to a coloured performer. This insight is necessary as so few people, in real life and in the book, talk openly about how they felt during the war.

The stiff upper lip is on display as Mary ‘‘pulled her gloves on and herself together'' after a private weep. Not even halfway through his duty, Alistair realises he is not coping, but a doctor's advice is: ‘‘It's war. There isn't a pill. Find a sweet girl and forget it.'' He and a close officer dismiss the daily hostilities with banter, e.g. calling elusive fish Nazis, or the ‘‘master plaice'', and imagining them goose-swimming!

There are some gruesome scenes exposing the full horror of war, and a bit of introspection by some characters about how they have changed and whether London, society and life in general will change after the war.

In his afterword, Cleave reflects on the difference in wars, more recent ones being more impersonal, and thinks about whether forgiveness is possible at only an individual level, or nationally. A lot is left up in the air, with food for thought, after an engrossing story.

- Rachel Gurney is an avid Dunedin reader.



WIN A COPY

The ODT has three copies of Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave to give away courtesy of Hachette. For your chance to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ‘‘Brave Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, May 3.

LAST WEEK'S WINNERS

Winners of last week's children's picture book giveaway, Reflection: Remembering Those Who Serve in War, by Rebecka Sharpe Shelberg & Robin Cowcher, courtesy of Walker Books, were: Linda Bowden and Christine Eady, both of Mosgiel, Garth Johnstone, of Dunedin, Lesley Gray, of Cromwell, and N. E. Hunter, of Waimate.

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