A review by incrediblefran
In Memoriam by Alice Winn

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad

4.5

Alice Winn manages to capture both the aching, repressed longing of the central romance and the visceral horrors of trench warfare. The early scenes set at Gaunt and Ellwood’s boarding school are golden and sunlit, full of promise and naivety, even as the shadow of the war lingers at the edge of things. And then the shadow takes over. 

The trenches are dreadful, and the men are broken down by their experiences there. Winn is interested in what the experience of war does to people’s sense of self, and to their views on home and beauty (Ellwood, early on, rhapsodises about the mythical England, but on a return home later he can find no peace, and can only be utterly furious at that which he used to love). In the trenches Gaunt can only bark at people in monosyllables, and Ellwood - lover of poetry, who quotes Tennyson as easily as breathing - soon realises that his “useless, incomprehensible eloquence” is completely pointless when faced with the butchery of Loos and the Somme. Poetry and the First World War are inseparable in British history (many of us learned most about the war not in our history lessons but in English lessons, with Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, etc.). But here, poetry is lost, or becomes an outlet for a terrible, bitter, utterly justified anger.

The mid-section set in a prisoner of war camp sometimes felt like it came from another book, one that was more about a gallant adventure (and I would absolutely read a whole series on the adventures of Gideon Devi, who was by far my favourite secondary character - he practically leaps off the page), but it was a moment of fresh air from the crushing despair of the trenches. I enjoyed it hugely, and I hope that if (when) this book gets an adaptation that the daring escape will be given the visuals it deserves.

I found myself oddly moved by the obituaries column in the school newspaper, interspersed through the book. Not just the obituaries themselves – though there is a bitter hollowness to them, always describing a gallant, quick and painless death in action, which the reader knows to be a lie – but the processional list of names, ranks, and ages. Hardly any of the dead are over the age of 21. Most of them are boys. Children. Lists and lists of lives cut senselessly, tragically short.

Gaunt and Ellwood are vivid main characters, and the texture and history of their relationship is beautifully drawn. They’ll stay with me for a while.