Simonson, Helen

Recent Reading

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

My recent reading has not been particularly exhilarating, but most of it has been just fine: no duds, just no thrills.

Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience was enjoyable but also seemed quaint, in a sad sort of way: what is the point, really, of academic satire given the existential threats to research, education, faculty, and students currently devastating the higher ed landscape in the United States? It’s true that things have been grim for a long time, including in the UK, where every day seems to bring more dire news about program closures, and in Canada, where “do more with less” has been the rule for decades thanks to chronic underfunding for our ostensibly ‘public’ universities. But Schumacher’s Professor Fitger and his students are very much American, and while there is both comedy and pathos in the story of their misadventures, and while the gentle optimism of the ending is a nice reminder that both travel and education can and should give people a chance to become someone a bit different and a bit better, the The English Experience, charming as it was, seemed more nostalgic than pointed.

Liz Moore’s Long Bright River is one of the best crime novels I’ve read in a while—though since I don’t actually read much crime fiction these days, I’m not sure that’s really saying much. I’d heard that it was character-driven, and it is; it is a good novel about families, especially sisters, as well as about the far-reaching personal and social harms of the opioid epidemic. It has a good number of twists and turns and kept me engaged without making me feel overly manipulated, which I appreciated. I’m always scouting for recent options to include in Mystery & Detective Fiction: I don’t think I would assign this, but mostly because it is pretty long and I’m not sure it’s good enough qua novel to spend the amount of time on it that I’d need to coax the students through its 450+ pages (more than two weeks, most likely). This is the conundrum of the “teachable” (vs. readable) text; this is why so far I have not assigned one of Tana French’s books either.

I loved both Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Summer Before the War so I eagerly picked up The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club when I saw the paperback had finally come out. Unfortunately, it disappointed. There is plenty of good material in it. I enjoyed the details about women’s wartime experiences and then their struggles as they were displaced from their jobs as the men came back from the war; I liked the ‘neepery’ about both motorcycles and airplanes. The characters are all promising types, in this context, but as the novel dragged on (and the pacing did seem too slow to me, too much talking without much purpose, too many scenes not contributing all that much) they felt more like cut-outs representing those types than fully realized people. I felt the same about the novel’s plotlines around racism and discrimination: these are good things to represent, of course, but they seemed, if not exactly perfunctory, at least predictable. Reading it I thought again of the conversation I had with Trevor and Paul about historical fiction: this is not a bad novel, but I think it may represent the qualities or aspirations or limits that make some readers think historical fiction is not a really serious or ‘literary’ genre.

I got Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing from the library as soon as I had agreed to review her forthcoming novel The Book of Records, on the theory that it was probably a good idea to know something about the earlier one in case there were connections. It turns out there is one possibly important one, though I’m still figuring out exactly what it means: throughout Do Not Say We Have Nothing the characters are reading and writing and revising a narrative called the Book of Records! I actually owned a copy of Do Not Say We Have Nothing for years and put it in the donate pile eventually because for whatever reason I still hadn’t read it. I assigned a story by Thien in my first-year class this year that I thought was really good, so this had already piqued my interest in looking it up again. I had mixed feelings about it. I found it a bit rough or stilted stylistically and never really fell into it with full absorption, but it is packed with memorable elements and also with ideas. It tells harrowing stories about the Cultural Revolution in China and focuses through its musician characters on how or whether it is possible to hold on to whatever it is exactly that music and art mean in the face of such an onslaught on individuality and creativity. It invites us to think about storytelling as a means of survival, literal but also (in the broadest sense) cultural—this is where its Book of Records comes in, as the notebooks are cherished and preserved, often at great risk. I’m not very far into Thien’s new novel yet but it seems even more a novel of ideas, perhaps (we’ll see) too much so.

My book club meets this weekend to talk about Northanger Abbey, so I also reread this. It has been so long since I read it it didn’t really feel like a reread, actually. It amused me, but that’s about it. After I’d finished it I read Marilyn Butler’s introduction to my Penguin edition and she makes the case that it is much more interesting and sophisticated than it is often given credit for. OK, sure, and I take her point that to really appreciate it we need to be as immersed in the other novels it alludes to as its characters are—but I’m not, and I’m not really interested in them (sorry, Jane!). I think I get the gist of the novel’s playful jousting with gothic conventions as well as other models of ‘women’s fiction’ from the time. I love and greatly admire both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, but for sheer pleasure I prefer almost any Georgette Heyer to this and don’t expect to read it again. Still, I am curious about what the other members of my book club have to say!

And that basically catches me up. I have just started Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, which so far seems as good as everyone said; I still have Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium on my TBR pile; and I’m still stalled out several chapters into Hisham Matar’s My Friends. Stay tuned for the next thrilling updates on my reading! 🙂

“Mourning in a Drawing Room”: Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

This was the confusion of war, thought Beatrice. That some should sit mourning in a drawing room, or smoothing the brow of a dying boy, while in a cottage on a cobbled street, two young lovers could only choose to stand against the shocking burden of death and loss with their love and their passion.

Only the first part of Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War is actually about the summer before World War I. In fact, as Hugh Grange, one of the young men at the center of the novel, observes before Part One has even ended, “the gathering storm clouds” have been on the horizon for a while, but they seem peripheral, almost invisible, even with the warning embedded for us, in the novel’s title, even with the dread that is the burden of our historical knowledge.

The Summer Before the War doesn’t seem at all like a war novel at first. It begins as a sly, comic, and occasionally touching tale of village life deliberately reminiscent of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia, with petty rivalries subtly indicating deeper forces of social change and resistance — and this is just one of many literary echoes. Simonson’s schoolteacher heroine Beatrice Nash, for instance, calls to mind Winifred Holtby’s Sarah Burton: though Beatrice is both an earlier and a less defiant figure of the independent spinster, her very presence in that role is similarly disruptive of expectations for a nice young woman. Mr. Tillingham, the grandiloquent celebrity novelist whose fiction is suffused with “piercing judgment” is very closely related to Henry James; Oscar Wilde’s name is invoked as a cautionary tale for a young man on the brink of potentially devastating scandal; and Hugh’s cousin Daniel eventually takes his place among the war poets who provide some of Simonson’s epigraphs.

This catalogue of self-conscious literary allusions might make The Summer Before the War sound precious or contrived, but Simonson’s characters are too much themselves to feel derivative, and the story she tells is rich in charm and humanity and, ultimately, pathos. Gradually the bright summer gives way, as we know it must, but Simonson unspools her story patiently. First we get to know Beatrice and Hugh and Daniel, and the young men’s dynamic aunt Agatha, and all the assorted characters in their community, with their foibles and attachments. There are many small satisfactions, including — to give just one example — Beatrice’s triumph (with significant assistance from Hugh and Daniel) over an attempt to oust her from her teaching position before it has even begun; and Beatrice’s discovery that at least one of the seemingly loutish boys she tutors in Latin during the summer has a real passion and aptitude for the work — including favorite passages of Virgil — is one of many specific details that will take on greater resonance later in the novel.

Only very gradually do the new realities of England at war make themselves felt. Food becomes scarcer, and extra preserves seem called for. Belgian refugees arrive, their suffering at first nearly overlooked in the villagers’ excitement at being part of “the great enterprise under way”:

To provide sanctuary was an ancient tradition, and as long as pride did not become hubris — she must not start talking of ‘my refugee,’ like Mrs. Fothergill — [Beatrice] acknowledged that it felt gratifying to have found some small connection to the war.

Inevitably, however, as the consequences and casualties mount, the pomp and pageantry yields to suffering. “At first it was just the King canceling the visit to Cowes,” muses Agatha;

“Then the cancellations . . . First just one or two amid the weddings, then more canceled than announced. And now the lists run with the names of all the finest young men of Britain, their deaths announced in place of their marriages, their lives ended before they can begin.”

As Hugh and Daniel both head for the front, it no longer seems “a grand adventure”:

Britain’s Expeditionary Force was being slowly decimated at Ypres as the opposing armies entrenched in a grim line across Flanders. The outcome of the war was no longer the rousing certainty so touted in the papers.

In this way The Summer Before the War follows the classic story of the “Great War” as a loss of innocence, a cataclysmic ending to a seemingly golden period of youth and hope and vigor. Though in many ways this is a myth (one initiated and perpetuated by some contemporary writers, including Vera Brittain), it still feels true, maybe because there really is a vast chasm between the heroic idea of war (and the glorifying paeans of nationalism) and the truth of fighting and dying, even (maybe especially) for “King and country.”

What interested and impressed me the most about The Summer Before the War as the inevitable catastrophe unleashes itself on our characters is that once the war is fully upon them, and us, it isn’t the contrast with the earlier, more innocent and bucolic, scenes that makes its horrors and losses so painful: rather, it’s the continuity. These are the same people, with the same dreams and values, the same attachments and affections — even the tone of the novel is very nearly the same in the trenches as it is when we’re in a sunny lane or a village shop. The Summer Before the War balances its attention between the battlefields and the home front, where loss leads too often to isolation. “On such a day as this,” thinks Beatrice, contemplating the bright morning of a planned festivity,

the widows and the grieving mothers were expected to keep their black weeds and pale faces in their shuttered homes. . . . No parade of victory or peace ever included the biers of the dead.

That has certainly not been true of the literature produced by the First World War, which includes some of the most potent anti-war poetry and prose ever written — and yet, as Beatrice reflects, watching one grieving mother kneel before the white stone that marks her son’s grave, no writer has ever conveyed the scene “well enough that men might cease to war.” Simonson certainly did her best, and to unexpectedly powerful effect, given the novel’s initial lightness. Unlike Simon Tolkien’s plodding No Man’s Land, The Summer Before the War seemed both fresh and original, and it also, appropriately, made me cry.