My dad survived the bombing of London; a few of his siblings did not. They, being children, hid under the kitchen table in their flat in Rotherhithe, and when the bomb hit and flattened the building, they died. During the war my dad worked in a shipyard machine factory. They were from a family of very many kids, and not so much money and they weren’t amongst the children relocated from London. Reading about the loss of their children in the book made me think about my father’s experience during the war. It was interesting how the book presents it. There is a terrible sense of loss, but it is written from a matrix of love, and that seems to make all the difference to how well such pain is tolerated within the novel, and also within the reader.

I suppose that the book is really about love and not war, although it uses war to showcase what love looks like under adversity, and behaviourally. And I have to say I liked what I saw. The main character, for example, is a woman who has to choose the kind of relationship she wants to live with and the choice she makes is not only sensible, it is life (and woman) affirming.  The fact that she chooses what looks like a regular domestic life of wife- and motherhood is not the point. She is already a writer, and a successful one at that, so her career is established, and our sense of her as a grown-up is already set. What the choice of lovers allows us to feel, is what a strong, capable woman chooses when she chooses for the right reasons.  What those reasons are, seem to me, to be at the core of the deep story.

I suppose I also connected with the book because of the smallness (and delightful provinciality) of the community on Guernsey.  It kind of reminds me of the Rez. Some of the characters know so little about the world, and yet know something deeply important about what it means to be human and this comes out in some of the characters. Miss Isola Pribby is one of my favourites. She can’t see the most obvious of human behaviours and yet she somehow manages to be at the right place and the right time, and because (I suppose) she has a good heart, what she does helps and does no harm.

There are nasty, venal people in the book as well, of course. Those who seek to make trouble and profit from the Germans occupation, for example. But they don’t get that much attention in the book, and there are no stock bad-endings and such-like moral statements from the authors, for which I was glad.  They also made it clear that the German men who occupied and suffered from the deep food and fuel shortages along with the Islanders, were not really the enemy.  There’s a few strong passages about how some specific of those soldiers were good men. I liked that. War is never all on one side, and never black and white.

There were also good passages about the victims of war…prostitutes for example, imported by the Germans for the Germans, and who die when being sent home.  They are treated in the book with respect. Another thing to like about the novel.

I’ve read a lot about war at one time or another. This one made me feel it in a way that most don’t.  The food shortages for example, my first mother-in-law suffered as a child during that time and even as an old woman, her eating habits still held the echo of no butter, no sugar, no tea, meat is scarce, etc. She would stock up so that the shelves groaned and some of the cans would be there for a very long time before they were used. And she never threw anything away.

I suppose I took to the book so well because of my past and the past of those I’ve known, but I think there was something else there, something that made me able to understand war in a way I hadn’t before. I think it was the deep sense of compassion in the book, the focus on love, and on love of all kinds.

Anyway, like I said, I haven’t come to a decision about it yet. Maybe I’ll reread it in a few months and think about it some more.