Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt's heart as he thought of Hercules and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.
In Memoriam
by Alice Winn
Genre: Historical Fiction
About: Gaunt and Ellwood are Preshutian boys. Boys born rich and meant to grow up richer in cushy bank jobs, spending their spare time reading poetry in dead languages and attending balls. But when war is declared every boy of fighting age (and younger) is pressured to join; many with ideas of gallant heroism. Rich, working class, boys and men are swept up in the horror. Because there's nothing poetic about war, and yet for Gaunt and Ellwood, war brings brief happiness too. When death fills your future, you can be more daring in your present, and there's nothing more daring for Gaunt than kissing Ellwood...
Thoughts
I don't think I've read WW1 historical fiction before. At least nothing as vivid and gut-wrenching as this novel. The market is over-saturated with WW2 novels and I think it makes a novel like this even more harrowing. The naivety of the schoolboys signing up, or the girls, even mothers, pressuring them to is heart-breaking to read. You really feel you're watching England in its infancy. An empire that's forgotten the gore it took to make it and so glibly sacrifices an entire generation for a war on a scale it can't comprehend. Knowing, as we do, how many lives will be lost in WW1 and then how soon WW2 will follow, made this unbearably tragic. Alice Winn did such a fantastic job at conveying the complexities of the entire nation through so many different lenses of war; those on the front, hospital volunteers, parents who will never understand but grieve their loss even if their child is returned to them, engagements broken off, marriages made, and the slow societal changes in class and women's liberties... The details are so impressive and give this novel its surreal time capsule feel.
Then there's being on the front itself. Horrific detail is brought to these sections and your heart is in your chest the entire way through - wondering who will be lost next, and how they'll meet their end. Ellwood gives no pity to the men who take their own lives before battle but, considering the many inhumane deaths war offers, suicide is entirely understandable. A particular scene that will stick with me probably forever is the POV from the German soldier in the Battle of Somme. That really encapsulated the war for me and was deeply disturbing.
The main reason this isn't an instant new favourite read of mine, was that I didn't feel I was given enough moments before the war to get to know all of the characters. Gaunt and Ellwood have so many friends (and enemies) but their names blurred for me. When a friend was later killed, even if I was in the scene with them or reading their name in the newspaper, I didn't know that person enough to care about them beyond a general sadness. Gaunt's cousins are mentioned a lot - and that was a great conflict to give him by making him both English and German - but we don't have that summer in Munich on the page. Glimpses and mentions but it's not experienced.
Of course the romance between Gaunt and Ellwood is the heart of the novel, but the development of their relationship, and of themselves as characters, is tied so intrinsically to the war that I find myself more impressed with the portrayal of war than of the romance. I'm not even sure I liked them as a couple, although I did love both of their characters and the changes they went through.
Overall, this was a truly impressive and ambitious debut. It portrays England pre-world war so authentically and carries through the shifts and changes that such turmoil caused a falling empire.
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