wake by anna hope

Times Literary Supplement 5 February 2014

The Orange Prize-winning author Helen Dunmore and the first-time novelist Anna Hope have both written novels that look back at the First World War from the vantage point of 1920. In contrast to recent non-fiction works on the conflict byMax Hastings and Jeremy Paxman, neither of these books diverts far from the view of the war as a tragic waste. In this centenary year, Dunmore and Hope focus on the impact of the war on its less visible and obvious participants.

Daniel Bramall, Dunmore’s narrator in The Lie, is a soldier who has returned to his native Cornwall from the trenches. Now homeless and an orphan, he builds a shelter on the land of Mary Pascoe, an elderly blind woman. After her death, he moves into her property where he is visited by the spectre of his best friend and commanding officer, Frederick Dennis, who was killed at the front and who appears to Daniel each night “clagged in mud from head to foot”.

He continues his friendship with Frederick’s sister, Felicia, a young war widow. Although their intimacy provokes gossip among their neighbours, it is a startlingly innocent relationship. When Felicia and her infant daughter Jeannie visit him, he reflects, “I don’t even want to sit down with them. It’s enough to have them here”. For all the purity of this alliance, Daniel is not an innocent man: he has told a lie, which will inevitably be exposed. The anticipation of this discovery is what propels the – often very bleak – narrative forward.

Daniel displays some of the dissociation that is common among the deeply disturbed: “I am afraid to go into crowds. In Turk Street it seems to me that every creature is in disguise. Their skin is a veil to hide the intestines and the raw, slimy flesh within”. His isolation is not simply a result of the war, however – he has always felt set apart from other people and he acknowledges that the only time he has experienced any sense of belonging was in the army. In the trenches, “We were paired to look after each other’s feet. Looking after your own feet wasn’t sufficient incentive. You’d think selfishness would be the stronger force, but it turns out that isn’t so”.

Both Daniel and Felicia were excluded from school, because of their class and gender respectively. Daniel clings to a scrap of “The Ancient Mariner” which he recites from memory, but, he says, “You have to have an education to make it fit together”. The pair also share a kind of self-destructiveness, as both of them appear to have the means to escape their grim circumstances even as we know, somehow, that neither will. Daniel is a tragic figure yet occasionally the overwhelming misery of his situation becomes slightly too alienating. In spite of this, The Lie is a substantial work, and Dunmore is able to crystallize tragedy in a simple sentence, as when Daniel is depicted on the boat to France: “We sat on deck and smoked, and saw England sidle away backwards, as if it was trying to escape”.

Anna Hope’s novel, Wake, takes place over five days in November 1920 when the Unknown Soldier was disinterred from an unmarked grave in France and brought to the Cenotaph in London for a state funeral. Hope’s main characters are three women who are coping, or not, with different aspects of loss.

Hettie is a nineteen-year-old dance instructor who waltzes for a sixpence at the Hammersmith Palais where she meets many ex-servicemen, some with missing limbs. Her brother has been unable to work since he returned from the Front, making her wages crucial to support her family. Twenty-nine-year-old Evelyn also has a brother who fought in the war, but she bears the scars of the conflict more obviously than he does: her lover was killed by a shell at the front and his body was never found. After she heard the news she went to work in a munitions factory where she lost a finger –a loss that seems to please her. Now she works in a pension office, helping ex-servicemen. Ada, a housewife, is grieving for her eighteen-year-old son who was conscripted and died in battle. Two years later, Ada has started to catch glimpses of him in the street. The preoccupations of these three women – with glamour and excitement; with life as a spinster and with a marriage that is “tripwired” – could appear pedestrian. And yet, we feel the aftermath of war just as keenly through their lives as we do through the description of the corporal who has a fit in Evelyn’s office or the officer unable to make love to Hettie.

Wake is unashamedly commercial fiction but no less affecting or skilful for that. Hope does make technical mistakes, the most obvious of which comes towards the end of the book when Ada stands in the street and observes a woman in what seems like an unrealistic amount of detail from across a road through a window lit by a small light. The novelist also occasionally resorts to banalities: on a letter which informed Ada of her son’s death, Hope comments “For something so heavy, it weighs nothing at all”. These shortcomings would be harder to forgive in a more experienced novelist but given the breadth of Hope’s ambition in this novel it seems churlish to dwell on them too long.

An unusual aspect of Wake is the occasional, italicized passage featuring a chorus of anonymous characters. Initially the interludes seem to muddy an already crowded narrative but, as the book progresses, they add heft to the book’s perspective on the war. The most affecting of these characters is an Irish soldier who stands close enough to Douglas Haig at the Cenotaph to see the grey in his moustache. ‘‘At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.” No. I will remember you when I pack my pipe. I will remember you when I lift my pint. I will remember you on fine days and on black ones.

Anna Hope illustrates the breadth of grief across the country. When Ada notices that the helmet on the coffin of the Unknown Soldier is the same type as that worn by her dead son, she becomes convinced that the body is his: Then there’s the sound of a woman’s sob, and another, and another, and in the crowd opposite hundreds of handkerchiefs appear, stark white against the black ....And then she understands. They all wore the helmet. All of these women’s husbands, brothers, sons.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement