'...I can see that when everything grinds to a halt, as it will have to, and the sources of supply are taken over but aren’t working properly, and the rich are holed up in their castles, then no duck nor cat nor even dogs will have a hope.’
‘I don’t think anything would induce an English person to eat his dog.’
‘No, most Englishmen would probably rather devour their children.’ [p. 266]
I've enjoyed almost everything I've read by Elizabeth Edmondson (who also wrote as Elizabeth Pewsey), and this -- after a slow start -- was no exception.
The novel opens in 1938, on board the SS Gloriana, bound from Tilbury to India. Verity -- known as Vee -- is fleeing undisclosed dangers; Lally, her American friend who happens to be on the same ship, is going out to join her husband; and Claudia, Vee's cousin who joins the ship at Lisbon, needs to be out of Europe now that she's 'come to her senses'. All three women were students together at Oxford six years before, and the choices and friendships they made in their undergraduate days have led them down very different paths.
Vee's early starry-eyed communism is considerably dulled by the things she's done for her nameless controllers; Claudia, so enamoured of Mosley and National Socialism, has met up with another university friend whose Jewish husband has been murdered; and Lally, always the most sensible of the three, is on unsteady footing with her husband -- though she is travelling with her step-son, Peter, who has been ill.
Verity is determined to record the events of her life so that if any 'accident' befalls her, there is a testimony of the crimes (legal and moral) which she's committed for the cause. Her account forms the bulk of the novel, and it's Vee's depiction of her time at Oxford which charmed me. She's a true innocent, shocked to learn that men (apart from Oscar Wilde) might indulge in intimacy with other men; appalled by the poverty and degradation she witnesses on leafletting trips to the East End of London; inexplicably drawn to the charismatic John Petrus; rejecting the Christian faith in which she was raised.
Claudia, though she has less of a voice in the novel, is also a fascinating character: not only is she comfortable in her aristocracy, she's also prone to 'flashes' of prescience about the future, all of them accurate. She does, however, sincerely believe that Hitler can save the world ... Of the three female protagonists, it's Lally who is least present in the story, least characterful. Her function seems to be more of balance and calm than of any political action.
Voyage of Innocence starts with someone going overboard off Alexandria, and ends with a sequence of newspaper clippings, society anecdotes and the like which detail the post-war fates of most of the characters. I was reminded, inevitably, of the Mitford sisters; of the Cambridge Spies; of Brideshead Revisited, and the heroic lies that led so many young British men to fight in the Spanish Civil War. This is a powerful novel, but seldom solemn: in the Oxford chapters, Vee, Claudia and Lally are young women enjoying liberty and intellectual stimulation in the heyday of their class, and despite their various crises they're a light-hearted set.
This is also a very feminist take on the trope of idealistic youth getting involved in the weighty political manouevres of the older generation. And for most, though not all, of the characters, there are happy endings, albeit with a bittersweet aftertaste: what Vee has done cannot be undone.
Some minor quibbles regarding copy-editing, such as mention of May Balls being on 'the thirty-first of April'. Also worth noting that this novel features cameos by a couple of characters from The Frozen Lake, set in 1936.
Phrase that snagged my attention: 'walking straight into the trap of her time'.
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