The theme of the book, as the title implies, is about truth
and lies – a retelling of that ancient observation that what people hold as
truth is often a lie and what they regard as a lie is just as likely to be the
truth. In the parlance of war, war being part of the book’s subject matter,
history is what the victor says it is.
This is a subject of never-ending fascination, and, in a
world where the President of the United States speaks of rights and freedoms
while sending fleets of high-tech death squads to kill thousands of innocents
on the other side of the planet, it certainly has fresh relevance.
While there are a great many lies told and truths lost along
the way in this book, I think the author largely fails in making her case.
Indeed, I think the book says things she likely never intended.
To my mind, an important theme of the book is the truly
suffocating nature of life on a small island where little happens and there is
almost no opportunity.
Boredom in the characters’ lives and their need to feel part
of a relatively small gang of peers and neighbors, no matter how obnoxious
their behavior or dull their character, this reader found genuinely oppressive.
I also feel certain the author did not intend to write a
novel about mental illness and the terrible damage that severe cases inflict on
friends and family, but that is what I believe she has done. Is the evident
mental illness of several characters here unintended? I think so. For the
author and a number of reviewers seem to think there is humor and humanity in
lunatic thoughts and vicious acts.
Does mental illness’s importance in this story (again for
me) reflect the effects of inbreeding over the centuries in so small a place as
Guernsey, further enhancing the suffocating social effects of island life? I
think so.
In her effort to explore truth and lies, Ms Horlock mixes
fiction with fact and has two stories running in alternate chapters, one is the
main, later fictional story and the other a part-fictional blend of earlier
events. One at first thinks of an admirable effort like the great German film,
People on Sunday, an original mixture of documentary and a fictional story from
1930.
But to my mind Ms Horlock does not succeed in blending fact
and history, and again, as with other parts of the book, there is confusion.
She makes a surprising number of errors in her history, as in often calling
German troops Nazis, when in fact the average German conscript was no more a
Nazi than the average Russian conscript was a Stalinist or the average Italian
a Fascist.
Again, the author badly confuses concentration camps with
death camps (note: camps are not a significant part of either of the author’s
two stories). Despite the term concentration camp having come down to us in
Hollywood movies as the places in which mass murder was organized, the truth is
that there were broadly two distinct and different sets of institutions.
Concentration camps - of which there were many and in which
the nature of the populations and the severity of their treatment by the state
varied just as with modern prisons ranging from minimum to maximum security –
were mainly places to isolate and punish dissidents and political undesirables
or to hold people until some further disposition were decided, which could, of
course include death for political crimes.
Along with some other allied nations, the United States too
had concentration camps during the war. They were for resident Japanese, some
Italians, serious dissidents, and others, but it called them internment camps.
The many people interned lost their freedom for years, lived meagre lives under
harsh conditions, and had their property, homes and businesses and bank
accounts, stolen and never returned even after the war. But mainly they were
not killed, and just so for the most part in Germany.
The death camps – most infamously Auschwitz – were disguised
as concentration or work camps but were places for organized, industrial-scale
murder in Eastern Europe under covering chaos of the invasion of Russia. The
death camps were not run by police or by the German Army, whose leaders mostly
wanted nothing to do with Hitler’s brutal excesses in breaking military
traditions and international codes.
They were run by a special (lowlife) branch of the SS,
itself a political army which served as Hitler’s Praetorian Guard whose
officers were selected and indoctrinated to provide an elite corps of Aryan
future-society types.
The author also speaks of the underground field hospital the
Germans built on Guernsey and leaves the suggestion that German field hospitals
away from the fronts were for the hideous Nazi experiments with prisoners. That
is simply not true.
The problem with this book is that confusion so often
prevails, and not just in historical facts, but in the main story, especially
in the main characters. Cathy, the protagonist, is supposed to be very funny -
an older, more earthy and sophisticated version of Martha Grimes’ Emma Graham.
But Cathy is in fact a pretty nasty piece of work, someone with little
affection for members of her family, someone given to ugly impulsive behavior,
and someone who tells lies extreme enough to destroy the lives of others. She
does not represent a “typical” adolescent in my experience.
Cathy is often not funny despite author’s effort to have it
so. Cathy’s light and elliptical adolescent descriptions strike me as not
consistent with her acts, which vary from just dumb to genuinely vicious.
Nicolette, alternately Cathy’s close friend and poisonous
enemy, is one of those adolescent beauties intensely and neurotically aware of
her attractiveness to others – always flipping her hair and spending
considerable time at mirrors and acting as though a moment’s attention from her
were a rare gift bestowed. The key to her nature is that she endlessly uses her
attractiveness to play the tyrant over the lives of virtually everyone with
whom she comes into contact.
Unless you like tales of “those good old boys drinking
whiskey and rye,” neither of these characters is attractive or particularly
interesting. Indeed Nic, for so Nicolette is called, is so lacking in human
values it seems unreal that many people in the story continue to crave her
attention and the glow of her presence. Nicolette is an extreme narcissist with
no loyalties to anyone or anything beyond her own perverse amusement and
poisonous humor. She is pretty close to what we today call a sociopath.
While we have all met characters like Nic in life, and may
well have been taken in for a while by false charm and glamor, the people in
this book are all taken in all the time. She is a walking center of attention
for Cathy and other girlfriends, a dark star in whose orbit they rotate, and it
strains credibility that someone this vicious and inconstant could long sustain
the interest and loyalty of others, at least of those with intelligence, as
Cathy is supposed to have.
The book is well written, and it has its moments, but there
are not nearly enough of them. In the end we left feeling the sort of fetid
horror of being at the mercy of someone like Nic, or Cathy for that matter, in
a small isolated place. And we are left with a long trail of bad decisions and
stupid acts trying to pass for amusement.
And it does seem very much to me that the author’s late
explanation for Nic’s treatment of Cathy is contrived and unconvincing. The
same circumstance, which I won’t reveal, is used to almost justify Cathy’s criminal
treatment of an excellent teacher, revealing not so much a web of lies as a set
of very warped values.
“Cathy’s teenage voice is a joy – funny, endearing and
credible….Horlock has created an authentic adolescent voice and…illuminated the
history of a small island….” The
Independent
“Irresistibly funny and poignant….” Financial Times
This reviewer cannot agree with either of those statements,
and they only demonstrate the fatuous and even incestuous nature of so much of
the book review industry.
