It's unsurprising that the 100th anniversary of the First World War is being marked by a variety of literary commemorations, both factual and fictional. Indeed, given that there are no longer any surviving combatants from the conflict, it's somewhat inevitable that we turn to our best literary imaginations to breathe fresh life into this dark period of 20th-century history. The familiar classics will be revisited – Penguin, for example, is republishing Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy as a single volume – and new tales spun. Although ostensibly set in the aftermath of the Great War, the celebrated author Helen Dunmore's contribution is addressing the dislocating awkwardness of a surviving but traumatised soldier's return to civilian life.
Daniel Branwell, the damaged protagonist still haunted by the horrors of the trenches, has returned from Flanders to the small Cornish village where he grew up, but many haven’t, including his childhood friend and “blood brother”, Frederick Dennis.
Daniel’s mother looked after Frederick and his sister Felicia after their mother died. They lived in the big house, their father a brutal, unloving man who “took to work as he might have taken to drink” after the loss of his wife, “mostly a voice behind a closed door, or a pair of long black legs scissoring across the hall”, as the children watched from the top of the stairs above. The boys’ happy companionship, with their jolly dreams of marching off to battle together, was cut short when Frederick dropped out of Daniel’s life “like a stone”, and headed off to officer training school, the “distance” between officer and man becoming abundantly clear once Daniel was in his camp: they were “creatures from another world”. For the first time in their lives, the gulf between them was abundantly clear, but their lives were still entwined, right up until the fateful night that Dan volunteers for the trench raid that Frederick is leading.
Back in Blighty, with his mother having passed away in his absence, Dan makes his home in a lean-to on the land of a lone friendly neighbour, Mary Pascoe, an ailing, elderly recluse. Like is drawn to like, and Dan steers clear of the village and its inhabitants as much as possible, until he crosses paths with Felicia. Not yet 20, she is already a war widow and a mother to little Jeannie. Felicia has always been there, at the corner of Dan’s eye – “I rarely looked at her straight, because my vision was taken up by Frederick”. Things should be different now, but Dan still sees his friend all around him: “the warm quick shape” of him “moving inside” Felicia “like a ghost”; haunting his dreams; and watching over everything he does – Dan is told what he initially thought was a harmless lie, but the consequences of which are quickly spiralling out of control.
Critics have long praised Dunmore for her skilful rendering of human relations, the thriller-like qualities that she inscribes ordinary, everyday interactions with, and while the same praise can be heaped on The Lie, the central relationship in the novel, that between Dan and Frederick, fails to excite. There’s no denying that she’s a technically skilled writer; unfortunately, though, unlike so many of her previous novels, I just didn’t find anything exceptional about these characters and their stories, a criticism that perhaps speaks more about the war novel as an overworked genre than any individual novelist’s endeavours. As actual memories of the realities of the war fade away, there is an increasing tug to make the imagined versions as real as possible – with every new trench-set TV series, film or novel, the stench becomes more palpable, the wounds more horrific, the horror more visceral. The Lie begins with stinking mud, a soldier “clagged” in it from head to foot, a living, breathing “mud statue” who haunts Dan’s dreams, the “reek of it” dragging him under: “Thick, almost oily, full of s*** and rotten flesh, cordite and chloride of lime.” It’s authentic, it’s tangible; it’s just far too familiar.
lscholes@thenational.ae
