Flatlands - Sue Hubbard

 

This has whizzed its way up my favourite books of the year list. It’s just beautiful. Inspired by Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose it stays true to that writer’s intent and tells of a friendship kindled against the backdrop of the second world war and Dunkirk. The location shifts to the East Anglian fens but the names remain the same. Fritha is an evacuee from London and Philip is a conscientious objector. A injured goose brings them together. 

The writing is delicate, lyrical, pastoral, high quality work that fills and uplifts a reader in spite of the gravity within some aspects of the story. It’s vivid writing and you’re quickly transported into Fritha/Freda’s world. I was so impressed by this author’s ability to, not just understand the world from a child’s point of view, but a child in wartime, evacuated into a less than warm household, missing, needing her mother. Her characterisation of Philip, too, an adult male caught up in the lunacy of war, is so sensitively portrayed and the balance between the two is exquisite. And there is never any descent into sentimentality.

Interestingly the two don’t meet until you’re a way into the book but we need their back stories to fully appreciate the tenor of their relationship so it doesn’t matter. Unlike Gallico Sue Hubbard deals with some pertinent issues. There’s no shying away from life’s brutality.

Philip waxes philosophical on the nature of war in one of the book’s most poignant and insightful passages.

‘…I believe that killing people is wrong. It solves nothing. War is a failure of the imagination. An act of the petty-minded. We live in an advanced industrial society yet have hardly developed emotionally since we lived in caves. Peace and love, Frith, are skills. A choice. Not just feelings. That’s something I’m slowly beginning to learn. Most catastrophes between people and nations occur from a lack of emotional intelligence. We can choose to escape our fate. Write our lives differently….’

Such powerful words. And yet in many ways this is a calm book, unhurried and full of depth, mirroring the passage of the natural world, a patient book until it needs to impose the urgency of an operation like Operation Dynamo. The older Freda is endearing in her musings on her present and her past, trying to make sense of her childhood and her friendship with Philip. 

This is the first Sue Hubbard book I have read but I am keen to explore more of her work. My thanks to Kate Wilkinson at Pushkin Press for a gifted copy.