Alice Witt: IN MEMORIAM
At a boys’ private school in rural England teenage
Sidney Ellwood is infatuated with Henry Gaunt. They both write poetry (in a
postscript Alice Winn admits that she drew inspiration for her two lead
characters from Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Graves) and have been dabbling in
adolescent sex with other pupils. But this is 1914 and Britain is going to war
with Germany. Girls are giving white feathers to young men accusing them of
cowardice if they are out of uniform.
As soon as they are old enough (18) Gaunt and Ellwood join up and find themselves reunited with other old boys from their school in the trenches of Belgium and France, culminating in the Somme, where wave after wave of British soldiers fight to advance a few yards into German-occupied territory. We already know the casualty rate: thousands die; thousands more will go home scarred and mutilated physically and mentally. The “war to end all wars”; of course, it didn’t.
Alice Winn is not the first female author to write about men at war. Pat Barker wrote a Booker-prize-winning trilogy and an early Susan Hill novel has gay love flourishing in the trenches. Like her predecessors, Winn writes beautifully and does eloquent justice to the theme of gay love in wartime. In Memoriam moved me to tears several times. This is an outstanding novel, one of the best I have read since the turn of the century and, right now, a timely reminder that wars don’t only happen to other people. Our fathers and grandfathers became cannon fodder 110 years ago, and it could very easily happen again to us and our sons and brothers.
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