Tag: World War I

Review 2670: Doorstoppers in December! The Deepening Stream (and Holiday Greetings!)

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Merry Christmas, everyone! This isn’t exactly a festive entry, but I have a real treat here in my one contribution to Doorstoppers in December. Although I had already read one book by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and thought it was far ahead of its time, The Deepening Stream was captivating.

This novel follows the life of its protagonist Matey from her first memories of childhood to the end of World War I. Apparently, the novel parallels Canfield Fisher’s own life, with the difference that Matey is a more ordinary person, according to the Introduction, than Canfield Fisher was, an everywoman.

Matey Gilbert and her sister Priscilla and brother Francis grow up affected by the state of their parents’ marriage, in which there is a continual state of one-upmanship. Matey’s father is a Midwestern college professor whose “company manners” are entertaining and charismatic and, Matey believes, false. But whatever his wife’s current interests are, he trivializes them, and his moods rule the household.

As a young teenager, Matey lives a year in Paris with the Vinets while her father is on sabbatical. (They always go to France because of her father’s field of study, where her mother cannot speak the language. A painful memory is the trip they took to the Netherlands, where her mother could speak but her father could not, and the fuss he made about it.) There she learns about a different kind of home life and a different way of conducting her own life. Used to running wild with little supervision, she sees that she is behind the Vinet children, who are younger, and begins taking her schoolwork and piano lessons seriously. She also feels at home.

Priscilla, whom Matey as a child believes is fearless, eventually copes with their home situation by making herself too busy to notice things, and this becomes a habit that continues to adulthood and keeps her from developing. Francis copes by treating everything as unimportant. Matey takes much longer to process her parents’ relationship, and it affects her throughout her life. However, when her father dies unexpectedly of an untreated wound, she is the only one to see that there was more to their parents’ relationship than they understood.

After her parents’ deaths, Matey learns that she has relatives on her mothers’ side that she has never heard of, because her parents never returned to her mother’s home after they were married and never talked about them. Matey has received a small bequest from her Cousin Constance, and when she goes to Rustdorf to inquire about it, she remembers her cousin’s home from when she stayed there as a child. At the bank, she meets Adrian Fort, a young distant cousin brought up as a Quaker who has just returned from Paris, where he has had to admit he’s failed as an artist and will join his father at the savings bank. He will become her husband, their relationship a close one. But she first has to learn how to be close to anyone.

With the advent of World War I, despite the U. S. neutrality, she and Adrian decide they want to go to Europe—Adrian to be an ambulance driver and Matey to use her legacy to help the Vinets and others who need it. Their friends and family are incredulous when they decide to take their two young children. Most of the rest of the book is about the struggles and conditions of World War I.

This is an absolutely fascinating novel. There were a few pages toward the beginning of the novel when Canfield Fisher was writing about the importance of play to children (childhood development being one of her interests) when I got a little bored, but after that, I was completely captured by the novel. It explores the intricacies of marital and other personal relationships, the influence of upbringing on children, the effects of war on humans, our responsibilities to others, and other issues that Matey thinks through, and it does all this without seeming weighty.

This is a terrific and thoughtful novel. It also is on my Classics Club list, so it serves two purposes. Three, really, because it is so, so good.

Related Posts

The Home-Maker

Some Do Not

The Happy Foreigner

Review 2600: Helen

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I thought I had read all of Georgette Heyer’s books, but when I looked up something recently, Amazon showed me that there were several I’d never heard of. So, I got a Conservatory Press print-on-demand copy of this one. It is one of her very few contemporary novels that are not mysteries, published in 1928.

Helen’s mother dies in childbirth, and although her aunt offers to take her, her father insists on keeping her. She is brought up in wealth on a country estate enjoying riding, hunting, and sports. She has old-fashioned values when she becomes an attractive young woman. Then everything is upended with World War I.

This novel spends a lot of time with the bright young things that emerged after the war. Helen is drawn into the set by some friendships, but her older friends are dismayed. She also attracts a young artist who may be a dangerous type.

There are long conversations in this novel meant to show how the younger generation is changing its attitudes from their Edwardian parents. It seemed to me that both sides had intolerant viewpoints, but the younger people, meant to be witty, seemed silly. In any case, I hate to say it, but I found this focus as well as Helen’s relationships to be a little tedious after a while. I didn’t think that this more serious romantic novel was Heyer’s forte. And both generations expressed attitudes about women that we find objectionable now.

As with most machine-read books, I found lots of wrong words. Not typos, but the wrong word replacing a correct one. I thought perhaps no human had read the book between machine-reading and publishing, but maybe someone read the beginning. I say this because the errors increased so much in the last third of the novel that sometimes it was difficult to guess what was meant. Helen is fairly consistently called “he” instead of “she,” and at one point, she is called “Heaven” instead of “Helen.” So, you can imagine how several errors could mount up to make the text unintelligible at times.

Related Posts

The Unfinished Clue

They Found Him Dead

Death in the Stocks

Review 2424: The Bookbinder

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Pip Williams revisits the Oxford University Press and the themes of World War I and rights for women in The Bookbinder. Again, she shows her skill as a storyteller.

Peg Jones has grown up around the Oxford University Press, but she’s a representative of town rather than gown. She works at the press as a bookbinder, but she has always yearned for more education and an opportunity to attend Somerset, the women’s college. Aside from the social and educational restrictions, she has been held back by a feeling of responsibility for her special needs identical twin sister Maude.

World War I has just started, and Peg gets an opportunity to apply for one of the positions on the men’s side, but she doesn’t take it. In a link back to The Dictionary of Lost Words, Peg helps Esme’s lover bind a printed copy of her collection of women’s words.

After the invasion of Belgium, Belgian women come to work at the press, and Maude becomes close to one of them, Lotte. Peg goes to volunteer at the hospital and is teamed a reader/letter writer with Gwen Lumley, an upper-class girl who becomes her friend.

Peg is torn between her feeling of responsibility for Maude and her resentment of it. She is both grateful to Lotte for helping with Maude and jealous.

Her contact with Gwen along with the help of her supervisor, Mrs. Stoddard, leads her to an opportunity to apply for a scholarship to Somerset. But she must pass two series of exams.

Williams is skillful at involving readers with her characters’ ups and downs as well as their self-development. I enjoyed this novel very much.

Related Posts

The Dictionary of Lost Words

High Wages

Weatherley Parade

Review 2321: Classics Club Spin Result! Weatherley Parade

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Note: the name on this cover image is misspelled. The cover on the book I have looks the same but is spelled correctly.

In Weatherley Parade, Richmal Crompton takes a look at changes in society through the lens of one upper-class family, the Weatherleys. Her novel begins with the return of Arthur Weatherley from the Boer War in 1902 and ends in the midst of World War II in 1940.

The novel is written in vignettes, chapters that take up a few hours, a few days, or a few months. What with children, grandchildren, and other relatives, there are many characters. No one is completely lovable or unlikeable. They are shown with their good points and flaws.

During the years, there are many events—happy and unhappy marriages, separations, a divorce, and deaths. Among these events, there is one treatment of a child that is hard to forgive.

Among some of the characters is Aunt Lilian, a young woman in 1902 of whom her brother Arthur despairs. He can’t understand why she keeps jilting one fiancé after another. She runs with a fast crowd and seems restless and bored. At first, I thought she was just ahead of her time, dissatisfied with traditional women’s roles, but I liked her less as time went on, and she eventually turns to alcoholism.

Arthur’s two children are Clive and Anthea. Clive is a boy who thinks everything should be done properly and by the rules, which doesn’t make him a popular schoolboy or, later, schoolmaster or father, even though his intentions are good. Anthea likes to have people’s attention, which works well when she is the mother of many children but isn’t so successful when they begin leaving the nest.

The novel stops in to visit these characters and their descendants at key periods of their lives. The scope here is broad rather than particular, so we don’t get to know any characters extremely well. I thought the depiction of changing times and attitudes was interesting, but I felt fairly neutral about most of the characters.

Related Posts

Family Roundabout

The Old Man’s Birthday

Greenbanks

Review 2276: Classics Club Spin! The Tree of Heaven

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Although the Preface states that the tree of heaven in this novel is stripped of its false identity in the end and shows itself as merely an ash—to symbolize the stripping away of Victorian sentimentality to realism—I have to say that depicting men’s deaths in World War I as glorious isn’t a bit realistic. But never mind. The book was written in 1917, so it pretty much had to.

The novel begins in the late 19th century when Anthony and Frances Harrison are young parents and have recently bought their house. One of the things Frances loves about it is the tree of heaven, which Anthony, a timber importer, states is nothing but an ash tree. The couple have four children, Dorothy, Michael, Nicky, and John. Frances is obsessed with her children, really the boys, to the point where Anthony feels left out.

This novel is about daily life in pre-war England through the microcosm of one family. Early on, as early as the first day depicted in the novel, when Michael refuses to go to a children’s birthday party, he demonstrates a fear of what he later calls the Vortex, which seems to be giving up his individuality because of the pressure of others’ excitements. As they grow, the children encounter situations which show and determine their personalities. The family takes in Veronica, the daughter of Anthony’s brother Barty and Frances’s best friend, Vera. Although Barty is family, he has become unbearable, and Vera leaves him for her long-time friend Ferdie Cameron. But Barty refuses to give her a divorce. Nicky, by then a schoolboy, becomes close to the lonely little Veronica, and it is thinking of her situation as a young man that makes him decide to marry a woman who is pregnant by another man, not for the woman but for the sake of the child.

As a young woman, Dorothy becomes involved in the suffrage movement, but doesn’t approve of some of their tactics. She too eventually backs off from the movement because of fear of the Vortex, while Michael joins a group of avant garde poets who renounce all previous poetry.

All of this leads up to World War I and the effect it has on the family and its friends. It is an interesting and well-written novel that provides a look at an ordinary (although well-off) family in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

Related Posts

Family Roundabout

Some Do Not

They Were Counted

Review 2118: Afterlives

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

An interview I heard with Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah made me interested in reading his latest novel, Afterlives. This novel is set in what once was German East Africa, from the early 1900s to the 1950s.

At first, the novel seems rambling, beginning with one character then moving to another, reminding me a bit of Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, but Gurnah eventually returns to the characters he started with. This novel begins with Khalifa. In Gurnah’s fashion, we first hear all about Khalifa’s family and education before getting down to the story of how he goes to work for the merchant Amur Bi-ashara. They become close, and Khalifa marries Amur’s niece, Asha. Asha’s father was ruined before he died, and Amur bought the house they live in, but he promised the house to Asha. However, he dies before giving it to them, and his son, Nassor Bi-ashara, keeps it. Although Khalifa continues to work for Nassor, resentment is there.

The story moves to Ilyas, who arrives in town for work and befriends Khalifa. Ilyas was stolen away from his family as a child, and so after he is settled, he returns to his village to look for his family. His family is gone except for a much younger sister he didn’t know he had, Afujah, who is living with her uncle and being treated like a slave. Ilyas brings Afujah back to town to live with him for a year, but then he decides to join the askaris in the German army, so he takes her back to her uncle. There she is mistreated until she sends a message to Khalifa, who comes and takes her back to town.

We meet Hamza when he is serving as an askari just before and during World War I. This is the story in which the theme of colonialism really gets going. Hamza eventually meets Khalifa, but much else happens first.

Gurnah employs a detached tale-telling style, which I noticed bothered some Goodreads readers, but he is a true storyteller. The ending seemed a bit of an anticlimax but wrapped up all the story threads.

Related Posts

Sea of Poppies

In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

A Sin of Omission

Review 1793: Dare Not Tell

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Full disclosure: Elaine Schroller is a friend of mine, and I received a copy of her novel in exchange for a free and fair review.

In 1939, Sophie and Joe Parker are about to make a sort of pilgrimage to Villers-Bretonneaux, France, the site of the most vicious battle Joe fought in during World War I, the one that gives him nightmares.

In 1916, Sophie Holt is a young American nurse volunteering in a hospital in Paris when she meets Second Lieutenant Joe Parker on leave from the Australian army. Joe is married, but they begin a friendship through letters that lasts the duration of the war. Joe’s wife Annie dies in the flu epidemic, but when Joe goes to look for Sophie at the end of the war, he finds that she’s married a British surgeon and moved to England.

The first third of the novel covers this relationship and follows the two until they get together after Sophie is widowed. Then it shifts in tone and purpose as Joe’s PTSD comes to the surface with the trip to France and the couple notice odd things going on in the valley around Chamonix.

It may be that this strong focus on their relationship creates some issues for me—in particular, that of characterization. Although both Sophie and Joe are likable characters, there is no sense of the personality of any of the other characters. For example, Sophie’s best friend only appears in one scene and later is reported killed. Sophie adopts her son, who is only mentioned in the novel and maybe speaks once, and Joe’s son hardly appears. And so on until it gets to Chamonix, so that I missed from this novel a real sense of what its other characters are like.

Until the trip to France in 1939, there is also little sense of the characters’ surroundings. That changes with descriptions of the landscape, and the novel, which seems to lag a little in the transition, picks up quite a bit.

Schroller has done a lot of research about the role of Australian soldiers in World War I France, that is clear. In her next book, I hope she works more at filling out the secondary characters and the sense of the world around them, both in setting and in the life of others.

The World My Wilderness

No More Parades

Goodbye To All That

Review 1580: Barometer Rising

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I got interested in the 1917 Halifax Explosion through my friend Naomi of Consumed by Ink. She has a page of books she’s read about the event, from which I selected this novel, written in 1941.

Penny Wain believes that her fiancé, Neil Macrae, died in action in France. She is aware there is more to it than that, but no one will tell her what it is, even her father, Colonel Wain, who was Neil’s commanding officer. But then, her father hated Neil. Penny has been working as a ship designer and has just had a design accepted by the Admiralty.

Penny has an admirer, Angus Murray, a doctor who is home on leave because of an injury. Angus is a lot older than Penny and is considered washed up because of his drinking, but Penny sees more in him.

What Penny does not know is that Neil is in Halifax. He was due to be courtmartialed for disobeying orders when the shed he was in was hit by artillery. He awakened with amnesia, having been mistaken for another soldier. Now, he is searching for a man he hopes will prove him innocent of the original charges.

This novel begins a few days before the cataclysmic event and ends a few days after. The description of the event itself, which caused an earthquake, a tidal wave, and an enormous wind, is impressive. Although I personally think Penny chose the wrong guy, I found this novel very interesting and involving.

Related Posts

No More Parades

My Darling Detective

A Harp in Lowndes Square

Review 1457: The Alice Network

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

I would estimate that 90% of the recent historical novels I’ve read in the last two years—and I’ve read a lot of them—are dual timeframe novels. Although I have read some excellent ones (The Weight of Ink comes to mind), I’m beginning to feel that they often indicate laziness on the author’s part. Why write a carefully researched novel about one period when you can write two hastily researched ones?

In post-World War II England, Charlie is on her way to Switzerland to a clinic for unmarried pregnant women when she ditches her mother to try to search out what became of her cousin Rose during the war. This all sounds very well, but the flippant first-person narrative style undermines everything serious about this section, turning it into, well, a historical romance.

She finds Eve, whose name as a preparer was on the reports her father received about Rose. And what are the odds that Eve is going to handle a report that mentions a name important to both her and Rose’s fates? Not too likely, I’m guessing, but that’s what happens.

In any case, then we plunge into the story of Eve, a spy during World War I, and back and forth we go for a book that is about 100 pages longer than it should be and very repetitive.

Worse, some of the detail and conversations, especially in the spy section, seem unlikely. I felt as if the characters were being put through their paces in benefit of the plot rather than evolving more organically. Characters are given traits to round them out, but these traits are just sort of thrown into the mix. For example, Charlie is supposedly a math whiz, but the most complicated thing she does is figure a tip or quote the Pythagorean Theorum (which I learned in 7th grade, and I think kids learn even earlier now). Neither is exactly high mathematics.

I know this book was very popular, and I think the subject matter is interesting, but I am not a fan of the execution of this novel. I wasn’t that drawn in by Manhattan Beach, but compared to this and some of the other World War II-based novels I’ve read lately, it was a masterpiece.

Related Posts

Lilac Girls

Salt to the Sea

Manhattan Beach

Review 1425: High Wages

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Jane Carter is a young girl hoping to get a job in Tidsley so she can move out of her stepmother’s house. While her father was alive, she was educated and cherished, but since the age of 15, she’s only been tolerated in her home. In front of Chadwick’s shop, she sees a sign posted for a shop girl. This would be a good opportunity for her, because Chadwick’s is the best draper in Tidsley. And, as she is of genteel appearance, she is hired.

She is excited to get the job, although she slowly realizes its problems. The room above the shop where she must live is not very nice, but it seems fine to her, and her roommate, Maggie, is friendly. However, Mrs. Chadwick skimps on the girls’ food, and Mr. Chadwick sometimes cheats her out of her commission, taking it for himself. Worse, though, is his caution at change in the shop. Jane finds she is good at her job and has ideas that will make money, but Chadwick often won’t let her try them.

A difficulty she isn’t aware of, as Maggie and her young man, Wilfred, invite her out with them every Sunday, is that Wilfred is falling in love with her. She, herself, is attracted by a young man named Noel Yarde, but he is above her in class. Then, lives change as World War I begins.

This novel has an appealing heroine, naïve yet practical, and not to be beaten down. Its realistic portrait of the times, particularly as they change over a period of about eight years, is interesting. The flavor of the northern town, with its grimness and social barriers, is interesting, too. As usual with Whipple,, I enjoyed this novel very much.

Related Posts

They Were Sisters

Because of the Lockwoods

Greenbanks