When I was asked by the lovely people at We Love This Book to nominate the book I was most looking forward to in 2014 it gave me an excellent excuse to wade through publishers’ catalogues checking out their forthcoming goodies. Tempting as many of them were, the new Helen Dunmore shone out like a beacon. I have long been a fan of Dunmore’s writing. She’s only put one foot wrong for me – Counting the Stars which felt like something of an aberration – but The Lie more than makes up for that.
Daniel has come home from the war, unscathed in body but not in mind. Living in a makeshift shelter on Mary Pascoe’s smallholding, he nurses her through her final illness, burying her as she wished on her own land rather than in the churchyard, taking over the smallholding and running it as she wanted him to, all the while keeping himself to himself and telling no one of her death. Threaded through Daniel’s narrative are vivid memories of his boyhood friendship with Frederick, the son of his mother’s employer, and nightmarish scenes from the battlefield, each occasionally overlaying the other. His nights, and sometimes his days, are disturbed by Frederick’s visits, ‘clagged in mud from head to foot’. When he meets Frederick’s sister Felicia, nineteen, war-widowed and mother to Jeannie, a bond begins to form forged out of loneliness, memory and an aching absence. Daniel’s continued pretence that Mary is still confined to her bed eventually arouses suspicion. Tongues begin to wag.
Daniel returns to a Cornwall unchanged from the place he grew up in, and yet everything has changed. Resentments of those who escaped the horror are inevitable. He is not the boy he was when he left: quick to suspect, easily angered. The Lie’s overarching theme is the appalling psychological and emotional costs of war but it’s also a novel about class. Daniel’s mother was widowed when she was twenty, barely scraping a living cleaning the houses of the rich. Daniel left school at eleven, a blind eye turned to the law so that he can work. He and Frederick become close friends – blood brothers – but it is Daniel who reads the books in Mr Dennis’ library – previously unread, bought by the yard as decoration – memorising the poems that ‘swarm, crowding me like bees’ in the shell-holes of France. Fiercely intelligent, Daniel longs for an education but his mother cannot afford the grammar school’s fees. When they go to war Frederick becomes an officer, Daniel a private but the love between them endures against all the rules. Daniel is left quite literally haunted by his failure to save Frederick.
Dunmore’s use of language and imagery is breathtaking, shining out in a narrative of spare simplicity: now there are no servants rich people ‘live in their own houses like children, not knowing how things work’; ‘Off she goes, to work her black seam of gossip’ perfectly describes Mrs Quick’s disapproval; departing soldiers see ’England sidle backwards, as if it was trying to escape’ – they have not volunteered: ‘They came to get us. Winkled us out of our shells, raw as we were.’ Recurring motifs conjure unimaginable horrors – bodies, buried but reappearing from shelled graves in a sickening parody of the resurrection; the stink of ‘mud, shit, rotting flesh and cordite’; rats who ’eye us up like chums’. We’re reminded, several times, that many of those at the front were barely out of childhood when Daniel notices that he’s grown out of his old clothes. I could go on but you get my drift. It’s a work of quite extraordinary talent. It’s long been a mystery to me that Dunmore isn’t spoken of in the same terms as McEwan, Amis, Rushdie and Barnes, the male cannon of her generation. For me, she’s better than all of them put together.
The Siege by Dunmore still stays in my mind – read, I believe, on your recommendation Sue.
So, so long ago, Rachel! I’d say The Lie is even better.
I know Dunmore best as a children’s writer, probably because the only one of her adult books I’ve read is ‘The Siege’ and it was so heartbreaking I have found it difficult to pick up any other of her novels. I think I will wait until the nights are lighter and the weather rather better and then see if I can find the courage to read this if that makes sense.
It does, Alex, and probably a good idea. I have a huge respect for her writing. Not only is it of superb quality but she’s so versatile – children’s literature, poetry and fiction which includes gripping thrillers. I’m a huge fan, as you can probably tell!
Which are her thrillers, Susan? That might be a good place for me to start.
Talking to the Dead and Burning Bright could both fall be termed ‘literary thrillers’, Alex. Talking to the Dead is one of my favourite books. Wonderful descriptive passages.
I haven’t read anything by Dunmore but this one sounds fascinating. And it sounds a bit like how Oates is rarely mentioned together with Updike, Roth (and DeLillo).
Absolutely agree with you there, Christina. Something to explore, but that’s for another post!
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