...all was quiet, a full moon prinking the frost so that the ruined houses looked like cliffs of quartz, and then, as she’d stood listening, her breath fogging the view, there’d been another blast, this one preceded by a noise like a rifle crack, and followed by a flood of orange light above the rooftops to the east.[loc. 893]
This is a sequel, though I was only vaguely aware of that fact when I started reading, and I didn't find the story difficult to follow even though I didn't know the previous histories of the protagonists. It's autumn 1944: Noel Bostock is fifteen, growing up in the Hampstead boarding house kept by his Aunt Margery, whose name isn't Margery and who isn't really his aunt. Noel never knew his parents -- the surname he uses is his deceased godmother's alias from her suffragette years -- and he's never quite taken to conventional life. It's possible to read him as 'on the spectrum' or simply very intelligent: his thirst for knowledge is fulfilled, to some extent, by the lodgers, who teach him Polish, maths, and so on, and he is becoming an excellent cook. (Just as well, since Margery -- Vee -- is not especially gifted in that area.)
Vee herself is the second in the triumvirate of protagonists: she has a murky past and a precarious existence. Like everyone else, she is struggling with the deprivations and dangers of life in wartime London, but when she witnesses a traffic accident and ends up in court to give her account of events, she has more to lose than a few hours of her time.
The third of the protagonists is Winnie, an Air Raid Warden who's trying to hold onto the memory of the man she married at the start of the war, who's now in a prison camp. Winnie (a former member of the Amazons, the girls' club founded by Noel's dead godmother) has a twin named Avril, who's Winnie's polar opposite -- sophisticated, elegant, privileged -- and who has just written a rather steamy novel about a female Air Raid Warden ...
Vee contemplates the possibility of romance, Noel finally meets someone he's actually related to, and Winnie wonders if the Romeo she married has turned into the editor of Homes and Gardens ... and their stories converge, overlap, ricochet, in ways that are both satisfying and credible.
And it is almost the end of the war, though the characters don't know it, though the rockets keep coming and London's in ruins. I was very appreciative of the final chapter, which wraps up the stories and shows us the long-awaited victory in a wealth of mundane detail: a man sitting on a raft in the Mixed Bathing pond, playing the clarinet; a Dalmatian with a Union Jack tucked into its collar; 'no drums, no bells, no fireworks or sirens'. I think it's the details (not all of them pleasant) that drew me into this novel; the actual plot is fairly slight but the characters hum with life, and their concerns are ordinary despite the tensions of the time in which they live.
After this, I bought and read the prequel -- one of the prequels, as it turns out -- Crooked Heart...
No comments:
Post a Comment