2021/008: Crooked Heart -- Lissa Evans

It was as if her life was being deliberately unpicked, the seams parting, the whole thing dropping shapelessly to the floor. [p. 198]

Prequel to V for Victory: I didn't find this one quite as enjoyable, perhaps because it's set at the beginning of the Second World War rather than the end, or perhaps because Vee, in this novel, is rather less likeable than in the later novel. As, to be fair, is Noel, who after the death of his godmother is sent to St Albans as an evacuee, or -- from where Vee's standing -- a lucrative little earner. He even arrives with an introductory food parcel!

Vee, struggling to make ends meet, lives with her feckless, uncommunicative son and her mute, obsessively letter-writing mother in a small flat. They grudgingly make space for Noel, and he becomes involved in some of Vee's less above-board enterprises. Sharp, unscrupulous Vee and bookish, idealistic Noel, it turns out, make good partners: inspired by the crime novels that Noel loves, they end up exposing a criminal who (unlike themselves) preys upon the vulnerable and helpless. Eventually, too, they find a place of safety together, where they can live as family: and they commit one last (is it last? is it hell) criminal act to secure that refuge.

But that's just the plot: this is the story of two difficult individuals, cleverer than those around them, forming a lasting relationship -- one that's stronger than the ties of blood that Vee has fought to preserve. Interesting how in some ways this summary reads like the summary of a romance: there's nothing like that going on, nothing sordid or inappropriate, just ... two lonely people together. And yes, I know that line is from a love song.

It's the little details of life during wartime that bring Crooked Heart to life, the reek of sweat and urine in a tube station the morning after a night of air raids, the 'vinegar and fireworks' smell after a bomb has hit, the unremarkable corruption going on everywhere all the time, the whale-meat sold as cod. There's a strong sense of the ridiculous, of people trying to cling to the banalities of pre-war life and the comforts of bureaucracy. But I did feel that this was a far bleaker novel than V for Victory, and I wonder if I'd have read that if I'd read this first.