Rating: 4.5 stars
CBR16 Bingo: Liberate (our protagonists are fighting in World War I to keep the world safe from the Germans)
Official plot summary, because I finished this book in early April:
It's 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt's German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.
The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.
I read about this in a book review in a Norwegian newspaper months and months ago and thought it sounded interesting. I put myself on the waiting list for it and completely forgot about it until my hold came in, and I had to actually look up why I'd wanted to read this book in the first place. Two public school boys who secretly love one another and can't realise their feelings for each other until they're also soldiers in the First World War? Well, that sounds like a laugh fest, doesn't it?
Obviously, this book is utterly harrowing and made me cry a bunch of times. Throughout the book, there are fictional snippets of the school newspaper from the boarding school Gaunt and Ellwood attended, which include lists of the fallen and injured, and looking at the ages of most of them (very few over the age of 25) is just heartbreaking. Because the world is a depressing and terrible place, I tend to read a lot of light-hearted escapism. This certainly wasn't that. It is a beautiful novel, though, showing so much of the banality of war and how utterly awful trench warfare was. Ellwood and Gaunt were wonderful protagonists, and it was very difficult not to get attached to them, and a number of their friends and acquaintances, most of whom die horribly over the course of the novel. I'm not going to lie, I actually had to peek at the final pages of the book to see if both protagonists survived, just so I wouldn't be too emotionally compromised if one of them didn't make it. I'm not going to spoil here what the outcome is - you'll have to read the book for yourself.
It's remarkable to me that this is a debut novel. Maybe it's deeply unoriginal and derivative if you've read a ton of novels set during World War I, but I haven't, so to me, this was beautiful, and difficult to put down (even when I wanted to, because if I wasn't reading, then characters couldn't keep dying) and very sad. I highly recommend it. The young men in this are clearly fictional, but they are also obviously modelled on actual men who sacrificed so much. Now I'm going back to closing my eyes tight and holding my hands over my ears going la-la-la-la-la with regard to all the horrifying conflicts currently happening right now in various parts of the world, because my sanity can only take so much.
Judging a book by its cover: This is the cover of the book I got from the library, and I just don't think it in any way captures anything about what this book is about. This looks like it's a book about young men who work in the stock exchange or something, not a harrowing tale of bravery, camaraderie, trauma, and love during the First World War. There is another cover of the book in black and white, with the bombs flying over the battlefield looking almost like fireworks which is very striking and evokes the feel and content of the book so much more.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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