Write about what you know. Isn’t that what we’re always told? Your own experience. I think it was Mark Twain who first put the notion out there, or was it Hemingway? No matter. Because when it comes to historical fiction, that just can’t work, can it? Unless you’re that writer who has perfected the art of time travel! Or your previous life regressions have been detailed and vivid. No, thorough research and imagination in swathes are the minimum requirement. But is that enough? Sure that can entertain, inform and you can have a perfectly agreeable and satisfying novel, but sometimes you need that little extra ‘je ne sais quoi’. That extra something that makes you think that the author really was there, really did experience the events described. And that was my feeling when I read Lucy Caldwell’s These Days. I felt as if I was reading a firsthand account of the horrors of that period in history.
Set in Belfast, the novel follows the lives of two sisters, Emma and Audrey. Emma is a volunteer at a first-aid post and is in a clandestine relationship with a female colleague. Audrey is on the cusp of engagement to a young doctor. The novel sees life through their eyes, but also of their mother, Florence. It’s 1941, World War II is in full flow and Belfast is the target for German air raids.
The story opens with an air raid and sets the mood for the rest of the novel. That sense of fear and anticipation of what might be ahead and yet the need to maintain some kind of every day life; going to work, eating, maintaining a home and …… loving. Romantic love, familial love, love of place, of pasts, possessions all also at war against ….. war.
There is no shying away from the brutality, the devastation and the despondency of war and destruction. The fallout that includes the helplessness of trying to comfort the bereaved, the desire to offer practical support. It’s all here. And it’s all so convincing.
As a story, I suppose it’s the kind of thing we’ve read before. It’s not the first Second World War story to deal with the Blitz. (It’s the first one I’ve ever read about the Belfast Blitz though.)But this writer seems to get, not just under the skin of her characters, so that we come to know them intimately, but also under the skin of the very fabric of life in Belfast. The female characters dominate, they’re well drawn, complete people, you can visualise them and they behave as you might expect them to behave. The dilemmas become the readers’ dilemmas because we are so invested in them. The male characters less, so perhaps, although I found Audrey and Emma‘s father to be a sympathetic man.The characters’ responses to the atrocities they’re having to live through is palpable. We are living the fear with them.
It’s such a well balanced story. It never gets bogged down with the detail, so it’s economic writing without shortchanging us. But perhaps the greatest strength in the novel is how this author has managed to vivify this lesser-known event in history. In a way you feel you’re reading an eyewitness account of what happened. Not just the facts; the bombs, and the casualties, the rescue operations, but the depth of compassion and emotion. I loved Florence’s philosophical musings which seemed to me to be the heart of the novel. That sense of impending disaster, changing everything familiar, bringing to the forefront old wounds and regrets, and wanting to make reparation on a number of levels somehow was very moving.
‘….what has haunted me most, what has come to feel most unbearable, the things unsaid, the words unspoken, the touches untouched.’
There really are no happy ever afters when it comes to war. There are survivors. A desire for normality. And paradoxically a desire for change. Beautifully exemplified by Audrey and Emma at the novel’s conclusion.
This story has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction prize. Another worthy contender.
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