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In Memoriam
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Debut Novel (2023)A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I • “Dazzling and wrenching, witty and wildly romantic, with echoes of Brideshead Revisited and Atonement .” —Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Magicians
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front 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. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front 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. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.
400 pages, Paperback
First published March 7, 2023
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April 12, 2023
thank god alice winn finally wrote about how going to war is kinda gay
March 31, 2024
The next The Song of Achilles. Beautiful. Moving. Stunning. Gut-wrenching. Two boys, secretly in love, sent to war. Haunting descriptions of WWI. This book wrecked me in every possible way.
In Memoriam is a debut, and I’m perplexed. Alice Winn sucked me into Gaunt’s and Ellwood’s story and took me from the idyllic green English countryside with privileged, spoiled school boys reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and glorifying fighting to the nauseating WWI trenches where those boys’ lives changed forever, watching soldiers’ eyes bulging out of their heads because of gas attacks or shells killing multiple soldiers in an instance. But PTSD didn’t exist back then …
Ellwood had a sudden image of blood pouring down the train carriage, the way it had flooded down the trench when one of his men had had his insides scooped out by shrapnel from a trench mortar.
Alice also powerfully showed the differences between those privileged boys and the working class, which made chills run over my body; eighteen/nineteen-year-old officers, sometimes even minors, giving the often much older privates orders, letting them march into a certain death.
”Over the top, you cowardly bastards!” I cried, my voice breaking, because I did not want to do it, I didn’t, Elly, I knew those men, but what other choice had I? They were stupid with fear, and only more fear would move them.
This story is violent and raw, harrowing, and, at the same time, mind-blowing. Alice swept me off my feet with her brilliant prose, the perfect use of a non-linear timeline and humanizing both sides of the battle. She pictured real and flawed characters and let me fall head over heels in love with Gaunt (Henry) and Ellwood (Elly/Sidney). Those two boys who were so in love with each other but didn’t dare to tell the other, Elly afraid to lose their friendship, Gaunt afraid to give in to what it meant to be in love with a man, both afraid to lose the one they loved the most.
It was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.
I treasured the bonds that grew between boys and men, sometimes deep friendships and at other times a short-term brotherhood, and how most men treated the relationship between Ellwood and Gaunt so casually. His fellow classmates knew Ellwood liked boys, and they just let him. And Gaunt learned that something he found so hard to accept wasn’t that difficult for others.
To have something that he had thought so grave be treated lightly and playfully—it was reassuring. He felt as if he had shed something, some weight he had not known he carried.
This book, this book, this book. It made me smile, it made me weep, it made me angry, it made me ache. In Memoriam is utterly gorgeous, a genre-bending story, historical, literary, an M/M romance, action-packed and still so character-driven, and therefore a book that, in my opinion, should become a bestseller, translated in many, many languages. This book deserves to be the next The Song of Achilles! So please, please, read this story!
When he and Ellwood were gentle with one another, there was a sense of awe to it. Their tenderness was hesitant and temporary, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.
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In Memoriam is a debut, and I’m perplexed. Alice Winn sucked me into Gaunt’s and Ellwood’s story and took me from the idyllic green English countryside with privileged, spoiled school boys reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and glorifying fighting to the nauseating WWI trenches where those boys’ lives changed forever, watching soldiers’ eyes bulging out of their heads because of gas attacks or shells killing multiple soldiers in an instance. But PTSD didn’t exist back then …
Ellwood had a sudden image of blood pouring down the train carriage, the way it had flooded down the trench when one of his men had had his insides scooped out by shrapnel from a trench mortar.
Alice also powerfully showed the differences between those privileged boys and the working class, which made chills run over my body; eighteen/nineteen-year-old officers, sometimes even minors, giving the often much older privates orders, letting them march into a certain death.
”Over the top, you cowardly bastards!” I cried, my voice breaking, because I did not want to do it, I didn’t, Elly, I knew those men, but what other choice had I? They were stupid with fear, and only more fear would move them.
This story is violent and raw, harrowing, and, at the same time, mind-blowing. Alice swept me off my feet with her brilliant prose, the perfect use of a non-linear timeline and humanizing both sides of the battle. She pictured real and flawed characters and let me fall head over heels in love with Gaunt (Henry) and Ellwood (Elly/Sidney). Those two boys who were so in love with each other but didn’t dare to tell the other, Elly afraid to lose their friendship, Gaunt afraid to give in to what it meant to be in love with a man, both afraid to lose the one they loved the most.
It was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.
I treasured the bonds that grew between boys and men, sometimes deep friendships and at other times a short-term brotherhood, and how most men treated the relationship between Ellwood and Gaunt so casually. His fellow classmates knew Ellwood liked boys, and they just let him. And Gaunt learned that something he found so hard to accept wasn’t that difficult for others.
To have something that he had thought so grave be treated lightly and playfully—it was reassuring. He felt as if he had shed something, some weight he had not known he carried.
This book, this book, this book. It made me smile, it made me weep, it made me angry, it made me ache. In Memoriam is utterly gorgeous, a genre-bending story, historical, literary, an M/M romance, action-packed and still so character-driven, and therefore a book that, in my opinion, should become a bestseller, translated in many, many languages. This book deserves to be the next The Song of Achilles! So please, please, read this story!
When he and Ellwood were gentle with one another, there was a sense of awe to it. Their tenderness was hesitant and temporary, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.
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June 29, 2023
The story opens in 1914 in a residential public school in the English countryside. WWI rages on and many have their schoolmates and family members in service. The young students eagerly and impatiently wait to get their hands on the most recent issue of their school newspaper, The Preshutian, to peruse the lists of names of past students who have lost their lives or have been wounded on the front. Among the present students are Sidney Ellwood and Henry (Heinrich) Gaunt, who harbor feelings for one another but are unable to express the same. Henry is half-German and a pacifist but feels compelled to enlist for the sake of his family and to prove his loyalty to England. Being handed a white feather (meant to symbolize cowardice) in public by a young lady, despite his not being nineteen which was then the minimum age to enlist, prompts him to enlist as soon as becomes eligible. Ellwood, of Jewish descent, is a “poet” at heart but also signs up as soon as he is of age as do many of their classmates. The narrative follows Henry and Ellwood through WWI and its aftermath as they brave the violence and horrors of war, all the while navigating through their feelings for one another.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn transports us to the trenches of the Great War as we follow those young men who bravely served their country, putting their hopes and dreams on hold in the interest of the greater good. The narrative is non-linear but not difficult to follow. Interspersed throughout the narrative are correspondence between Ellwood and Gaunt and pages from The Preshutian, with the lists of those wounded, missing and those who were killed in action, with a poignant “In Memoriam” section comprising the obituaries of alumni who have lost their lives on the front. Lord Tennyson’s work is referenced multiple times throughout the narrative (the title of the book is taken from “In Memoriam A.H.H.)” with The Charge of the Light Brigade of particular significance. In describing the war effort, the author also alludes to social class distinction among the officers and references imperialist Britain and how colonization contributed to diversity within the ranks.
“We told those Algerians that their civilisation was no good, that they must have ours instead, we carried our white man’s burden dutifully, enlightening Indians—Indians! They who built the Taj Mahal! And Egyptians! For we knew better than their pyramids! We swarmed through Africa and America because we were better than they, of course we were, we were making war humane, and now it has broken down and they are dragged into hell with us.”
We meet several characters in the course of Henry and Ellwood’s journey, some for a longer duration than others, but each of them are important in how they are impacted what they experience. Not everyone will survive the war and for those who return, what they have experienced and witnessed will leave an indelible imprint on their lives. The author is unflinching in her depiction of both the the physical and emotional trauma that these young soldiers endure and how these experiences impact their perceptions of country and honor as well as their personal relationships and general worldview.
Author Alice Winn pays great attention to detail. The scenes from the trenches of Loos and Somme are vividly descriptive and heartbreaking but exquisitely written. This is a tender love story - a story of bravery and sacrifice - and also a coming-of-age tale wherein the author captures the camaraderie and the competitiveness among school friends and the innocence and hopefulness of boyhood beautifully and how a generation of young men (some as young as fifteen) were led to experience the harsh reality of a country at war, exposing them to horrors they could have never imagined. There are a few melodramatic moments but this does not detract from the overall reading experience.
“I actually believed that the principles of our civilisation, our civilisation that has developed further than any other in the history of the world, giving us telephones and trains and flying, for God’s sake, we can fly, I thought, surely such a civilisation, that prides itself on conquering the beast in man and seeks only to bend towards beauty and prosperity, surely, surely, surely, it would not shatter in such a vile and disgusting way. The Hague Convention sought to make war more humane. We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane. “
Please read the Author’s Note where she discusses the historical context and the people, places and true events that inspired this novel.
This is certainly one of the most compelling debut novels I have read this year. I can’t wait to read more from this talented new author.
March 11, 2023
“Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.”
The Charioteer meets All Quiet On the Western Front in this haunting and elegiac debut novel that juxtaposes the horrors of war with a powerful love story. It’s a novel about love, survival, death, and the reality and the aftermath of witnessing and being participants in unthinkable violence. The idyllic landscapes and the trivialities of youth we encounter in the opening chapters belie the violence and pain that are to come, making those earlier moments all the more precious, all the more bittersweet. This novel broke my heart. It made me cry, it made me despair, it made me feel all of the feels. In Memoriam is a gut-wrenching novel revealing the brutality and the banality of war: time and again we are made to read of young men, boys really, dying in the most horrible and random of deaths, and we see how their bodies are merely replaceable cogs in the machine of war. But I am getting ahead of myself.
“He went there in the mornings, sometimes, and gave himself to that strange country rapture, that deep, bonewarming feeling that England was his, and he was England’s. He felt it as strongly as if his ancestors had been there a thousand years. Perhaps he felt it more strongly because they hadn’t.”
The opening pages transport us to 1914, to Preshute, the idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. Here we see the petty disagreements and secret entanglements between various students, most of whom have grandiose visions of the English Empire, of honor, of war. Despite their different temperaments Henry Gaunt and Sindey Ellwood are best friends. Their friendship is complicated by the unspoken feelings they harbor for one another. Each believes that their love is unrequited and that acting on it will inevitably ruin their friendship. So, they spend their days pining for each other and trying to hide, not always successfully, their true feelings. In this rarefied world, they spend their days talking about meaningless and meaningful things, yet, news of the war puts a strain on their days of idleness. Gaunt and Ellwood, alongside their friends, are particularly drawn to the ‘In Memoriam’ section of their paper, and while soon enough the names on those pages are of boys and men they know, these also seem to promise heroic tales that speak to them given that they are well-versed in the classics. Gaunt, however, who is half German, feels differently about these things from most of his peers. Yet, despite his anti-war sentiments he finds himself pressured to enlist by his mother and his sister after they reveal that it will put to rest rumours questioning where their family’s loyalties lie.
“Ellwood’s England was magical, thought Gaunt, picking his way around nettles. But it wasn’t England.”
Ellwood, a year younger, initially stays behind, keeping a correspondence to Gaunt that reveals the unbridgeable gap between his reality at Preshute and Gaunt’s one on in the trenches. They continue to yearn for one another, but their love is soon obscured by the horrors Gaunt experiences on the front. Class privileges continue to be felt in the army and Gaunt, a boy still, is in command of men who are twice his age and did not grow up in the sheltered walls of Preshute. Concerned for Gaunt, Ellwood eventually decides to enlist as well, and he is joined by most of his friends. Soon enough he realizes that his former visions of honor, glory, and England have little to do with the day-to-day reality of war. From the living conditions to the landscapes punctuated by bodies and gore. And always so much death all around them. Death that is not always a result of enemy fire. The men around him die because of infections, a literal misstep, or a mild malady turned deadly. They also die because they waver, and their hesitancy is deemed an act of cowardice. They are driven mad, by the violence they see, and the violence they do.
“It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children . It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.”
Gaunt and Ellwood’s love seems a foreign thing in a reality like this. Yet, their proximity to death is also what makes them now more than even desperate for the other.
Their relationship is a fraught one given the circumstances that have led to their coming together. Gaunt in particular being Ellwood’s superior, and haunted by his own actions at the front, is committed to keeping their relationship one of convenience, something that pains him as much as Ellwood. Ellwood, who still retains at this point an easy-going insouciance, tries his best to be of comfort to Gaunt, but, eventually, their paths diverge.
During the months and years following their enlistment, we watch them trying to survive but retaining one's body and one's mind in war is no easy feat. The more of his friends die, the more Ellwood begins to change, and his attempts to immure himself to pain see him turn into someone who is jaded, cruel, and angry.
Gaunt, who had for so long suppressed his feelings, and rarely allowed himself to feel things fully, is reunited with some old friends and their companionship, as well as the possibility of seeing Ellwood, spur him on.
Oh, my poor heart. At first, I was fooled by the beautiful prose and by the dazzling intensity of Gaunt and Ellwood’s yearning. Once we leave Preshute behind, there are only echoes of that earlier beauty. There are moments of kinship, of comradeship, between the men. Their banter is a temporary reprieve from the fear, uncertainty, and brutality of war. Against this unforgiving landscape, punctured by violence and agonizing waits, Gaunt and Ellwood’s feelings for one another, as well as their faltering relationship, appear almost as if bathed by a quietly luminous light.
“I wish I could be more articulate, but the English language fails me. It sometimes feels as if the only words that still have meaning are place names: Ypres, Mons, Artois. Nothing else expresses.”
Alice Winn doesn’t hold back from portraying the realities of war or from being critical of the British. Except for one character, Gaunt’s sister, the novel is populated by characters who for better or worse struck me as real. Given the period and depending on a character’s background, they would inevitably express troublesome views. Rather than indicting or condoning them, Winn allows her characters to be flawed, messy, and idiosyncratic. Notions of duty and honor, as well as cowardice, are recurring motifs, as we witness how these have shaped and continue to shape the characters. Some find themselves holding onto patriotic beliefs, others are unable to reconcile the realities of war with their lives so far. Some are driven mad, lashing out against their fellow men, or retreating inward, so inward that their physical body no longer matters. Time and again we are reminded of how young these soldiers are, and the myriad of banal ways their lives can be cut short. We see the disconnect between those on the front, and those who dispatch orders from afar, often sending hundreds or more to meet avoidable deaths.
But you keep on reading, hoping against hope for a miracle, a way for Gaunt and Ellwood to be brought back together…
“My dearest, darling Sidney, There was nothing else.”
In Memoriam really tore me up. Yet, the majestic prose, the urgency of the story, and the bond between Gaunt and Ellwood kept me turning pages. There are so many scenes and passages that are harrowing, raw, and unsparing in their brutality. And maybe those make those moments of stillness, of quiet, all the more agonizingly tender.
“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried. He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”
And the more I read, the more worried I became, as it was clear that no one was safe and everything goes. And it was fucking heartbreaking to see just how unrecognizable some of the characters become. They may not have died but they are certainly not living. And Winn succeeds in capturing that specific terror of being confronted with the possibility that someone you know, someone you love, is there but not. Their body is, it may even look eerily unchanged. But their minds are no longer the same. You may lie to yourself into believing that they will be restored to who they were, that time will heal their wounds, but eventually, you might have no choice but to confront the reality: that they will never be who they were.
The novel’s exploration of love, queerness, and of morality, definitely brought to mind works such as The Charioteer, The Absolutist, and Maurice. Winn’s writing has this pictorial quality and melancholy that really brought to mind the style of Mary Renault, so much so that even the way the characters speak, their inner turmoils, and the way they interact with one another, all made me think of Renault's work.
The characters are continually faced with difficult choices, but the rhythms of war and the chaos of a battle rarely allow the time for them to question whether what they are doing is right, wrong, or another thing altogether. What do you do when you know you are being sent to your death? What do you do when the people around you are losing their minds?
“Ellwood was surprised to find that he was not glad either, although his hatred grew and grew. But he could not hate soldiers. He longed to destroy, to hurt, to kill, but he wasn’t sure whom. Possibly the civilians.”
My one quibble lies in Maud, Gaunt’s sister. She is the kind of female character that you can find in Natasha Pulley’s books or other historical fiction featuring a gay romance, that is a young woman who is a source of conflict for the couple, and always finds a way to excuse their callousness and selfishness (often by reminding the other person of the limitations imposed on her by her gender). Her presence annoyed me. Winn does, unlike Pulley, try to make her readers feel for Maud, but I had a hard time ignoring how uncaring and sanctimonious she was, especially towards Gaunt. And she never seemed to listen or to allow for someone else’s perspectives, presenting herself instead as the wronged party. But maybe a re-read will make her character more tolerable...
“Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt […] feared that ugliness was too important to ignore..”
The main characters, Gaunt and Ellwood are compelling, and so are their differences and similarities. Not only does Winn render the patterns of their thoughts, but is able to convey their voices: the way they speak, the kind of things they would say, and so. The cadences of their speech, and the way their minds work, however exasperating, Winn captures all of this, so that they both felt like real people. This makes the way they change all the more heartbreaking. Having grown to care for them, to see them become so unlike themselves, it was truly harrowing. Their feelings for each other are beautiful. They long for each other, but they are unable to articulate their love. Yet, they do form a love language of sorts, as they borrow the words of other men, quoting poetry and the classics to one another. Even at Preshute their love is clouded by worry, by the possibility that their feelings are unrequited, and later on, it is obscured by the war. Trauma changes them, and it changes the way they can love, and I cannot stress enough how that scene, that scene you were waiting for so long, has none of the happiness and warmth you’d expected. This may seem like an exaggeration but I felt bereft. But it would have been disingenuous to have that scene go any other way.
We encounter so many men within these pages. Some live, but a sentence, others live longer, but their safety is never a guarantee.
“How alive it all seemed, and how gracious—to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.”
Time and again Winn juxtaposes the beauty, the poetry, and the blissful freedom of their time at Preshute, with the newfound reality, which is oppressive, brutal, and bloody. In portraying Ellwood and Gaunt’s experiences on the front, Winn never takes the easy option, by making all of their actions and behaviors heroically selfless acts. Gaunt cannot wholly shake himself of his anti-war sentiments, nor can he ignore that he is fighting against the Germans, a people he still feels part of. Ellwood instead grows bitter towards that and those he’d loved, from the poets he admired to the civilians back home who easily speak of the war without even knowing its ravages first-hand.
“It was a common conversation. In 1913, you might ask a new acquaintance where he had gone to school, or what he did for a living. In 1916, it was this: what part of yourself did you most fear losing?”
The time period is depicted with startling realism. From showing the constraints experienced by Gaunt and Ellwood, their awareness of their difference from others, not only when it comes to their sexuality, but Gaunt is half-german and Ellwood has Jewish roots. We also see how Preshute both insulated them from the real world, but not wholly, as there they are still expected to obey certain hierarchies and traditions, and they are taught that displays of emotions are a weakness.
“He did not know that it was the first thing homesick little boys in their dormitories learnt at boarding school: how to cry in silence.”
In Memoriam is a novel that hits hard. It’s beautiful, theatrical, and romantic. It’s brutal, tragic, and devastating. It’s a book about war, death, trauma, and grief. It’s also a book about love: the love between friends, between brothers in arms, between allies, and, of course, between lovers. It’s by no means an easy read but it’s a gripping one. If you don’t mind sobbing, and feeling as if your heart was in your throat, In Memoriam is a soul-stirring and arresting read that has your name on it.
A symphonic meditation on love, brotherhood, masculinity, death, grief, and trauma, In Memoriam is a startlingly evocative and deeply excruciating debut novel that I am planning on losing myself into again and again.
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October 19, 2022Alice Winn has pulled off a remarkable feat in making these men and the horrors of the First World War come so viscerally alive. It was like looking at a black and white photograph which has been colourised, and suddenly you understand that these shadowy people from the past also dreamed and cried and breathed just as we do now. I was completely absorbed, moved, and transported.
January 11, 2023
rep: gay mc, Jewish gay mc, Indian side character
tw: extreme gore, violence, blood, murder, suicide, body horror, period typical homophobia, internalised homophobia, PTSD, panic attacks
an honest book about war, and simultaneously the most tender one you will ever read. all thanks to the bottomless love those boys feel for one another.
near the very end a character quotes a philosopher arguing that gay love is the purest form of love, and somehow the book itself feels like a homage to that statement, while also showing all the ugliness of human emotions.
full review to come!
tw: extreme gore, violence, blood, murder, suicide, body horror, period typical homophobia, internalised homophobia, PTSD, panic attacks
an honest book about war, and simultaneously the most tender one you will ever read. all thanks to the bottomless love those boys feel for one another.
near the very end a character quotes a philosopher arguing that gay love is the purest form of love, and somehow the book itself feels like a homage to that statement, while also showing all the ugliness of human emotions.
full review to come!
June 10, 2024
“You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book reader. Specifically, I am not a WWI/WWII historical fiction reader. Some part of my brain was oversaturated with watered down romanticized versions of those wars specifically a while ago and I have had a bit of an aversion ever since. However, I was in a mood (depressed and ready to be emotionally destroyed), and this book filled that void for me well. I read this book in approximately nine hours, finishing as the sun began to rise. I laughed, I cried, I felt. I read this fast and I wanted my soul to be ripped to shreds. While this was what I needed and I couldn’t put it down, there were parts that were nagging me, begging me to critique. Just know (speaking to you, mags, don’t combust) that I did have an emotional 9 hours with this book, and if I ever feel compelled to read this again, the rating may go up.
“But Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt… feared that ugliness was too important to ignore.”
The focal point of this is book is war and how war changes people and that part seems to be very well and thoroughly discussed. Ellwood has always had idealistic dreams about war, believing what was written in the in memoriam’s for his old classmates and dreaming of a noble battle while quoting Tennyson constantly. Gaunt hates the war and has some ability to see through to the ugly truth of war and doesn’t want to fight. During one of the first times Ellwood sees combat, he turns to Gaunt and says, “ ‘I want to go home. . . We’re not nineteen yet, we could still go home. . .’ ” The war is never glamorized nor is it just used as a backdrop, the affect it has on people is at the forefront of the story. As the fighting continues and the in memoriams of the friends we briefly met pile up, the pain is always felt strongly. I have heard that a lot of the in memoriams and depictions of war are pulled pretty directly from the books that Winn cites as inspiration, I am not sure how true that is as I have not read them, but that is something I would like to note.
“You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless.”
In Memoriam opens at an all-boys boarding school (a setting I am quite a sucker for) in England, where rich boys discuss the War as if it is the most glorious thing to happen, while the deaths of their older peers who are already in the trenches slowly trickle in through the school newspaper. I am a sucker for a good boarding school and was excited to get to know this (very large) cast of characters in an intimate way through their boarding school life before we got into the war. The biggest complaint I have with this book was that everything moved so fast. There was no time to grab hold of anything. I have a feeling this may have been intentional, to show how little time we have, especially when young men are going off to war and their lives end before they even had a chance to begin, but I found that this also meant that the introductions to characters (even our main ones) and their dynamics were a bit weak. I chalk this up in part to Winn’s fanfiction origins (which I promise I have nothing wrong with, I love a good fanfiction) as in a fanfiction setting characters are already more established so there is less of a need to delve into a character before the action of the story starts. The introduction was so quick I felt like I was getting a bit of whiplash as I expected that Elly and Gaunt would have a little more time to develop and that part 1, approximately third of the book, would be focused only on school, alas Winn moved fast and there was no time for pleasantries I suppose. While I did find this book heartbreaking, I do think that Winn was relying a bit on works that came before her to pull at the heart strings during the set-up period. The War was harrowing, but the I was left wanting with the emotions of youth before we got into the thick of it and found that the relationship between them was the weakest part of the book for me because of the lack of time I had to watch them together. Additionally, I found some of their later dialogue to be a bit. . . well it was clear she wrote drarry fanfiction is the best way I can put it. I found myself being the least interested in their later parts together, in part due to this.
“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man’s Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
The letters from Gaunt to Ellwood while he was on the front line and how we see how much Gaunt censored even for Ellwood once he is on the front himself are an important, yet painfully short part of this book. Again, there were months of letters and I felt as though these were so rushed, I wish we got a little bit more of this development. Nonetheless, seeing the juxtaposition of how Gaunt wrote to Elly, his time in the trenches, and how he wrote to his friend, a soldier on the front lines elsewhere, was harrowing and a great way to show the difference in what soldiers experienced versus what they whittled down and kept inside.
“He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him. . . It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.”
Ellwood is the character that we watch change the most throughout this book, and it is a particularly heartbreaking yet realistic portrait, especially of a man who has lost so many people and who doesn’t know how to do anything but fight anymore. Watching him move from a hopeful youth to violent, erratic, and scared was heartbreaking in a way that I don’t think I anticipated (which is a bit silly of me as this is a book about war).
“It was hard to look at him and remember all the years they had spent together, not knowing what violence awaited them.”
Again, I do really wish we got to spend a bit more time with these boys before the horrors of war caught up to them—this really would’ve benefitted from having a hundred or so more pages focused on that—but watching the change and then deaths of these boys, who I may not have remembered when they were first reintroduced, but damn did I not forget them after that, was especially hard hitting. The juxtaposition of knowing how most of them died versus seeing their in memoriams was also heartbreaking. At the end Winn stated that she directly lifted a lot of in memoriams from actual papers during WWI, which I do think was smart, but does make me wonder how much of Winn’s work I actually loved versus how much of it was lifted from actual WWI stuff. I’m still trying to decide if it makes a difference.
“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how hard he tried.”
I thought that I had more of an emotional connection to Gaunt and Ellwood before I got to the last part, and then I realized that the swiftness of the first part of the novel had left me a bit. . . empty in regards to their relationship. I could see inklings of it, but it wasn’t as fleshed out as I had imagined it would be. Winn did an excellent job at tugging at my heartstrings during everything except this aspect, where I felt left wanting more. Even as I write this, I am thinking that maybe someone will comment about how that was part of her intention, so I will clarify. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted more of them together, it was that I wanted to want more of them; I wanted to feel their yearning, their pain, to feel how, while the War had taken so much from them and that they had to shove it down, this was the breaking point for them. I still cared, and was a bit heartbroken, but I wanted a bit more. I think apart of this was the fact that part II, while important, seemed to stretch on forever and it made the pacing feel a bit off. Maybe it was supposed to, but I cannot help but feel that it detracted something that I was supposed to feel deeply.
“ ‘War is. . . a violent teacher?’ he said, eventually. Gaunt smiled at him, ‘That’s right.’ The countryside streamed greenly past the windows. ‘It didn’t teach me anything,’ said Ellwood.”
The end of this book is quite devastating, yet hopeful in a bit of a sad way. I think it shows well how no one is the same after war, how, even if you survive, you are nothing near the same man you were. There is little comfort after the war ends, but there is a little hope of brighter days. Despite my critiques of it, I found it to be quite moving especially in the portrayal of war. I really did appreciate this for what it was, I think I’ve just found other media to be more moving for me in terms of actual queer relationships, and I went into this expecting to be a bit more moved by that aspect of the story.
“Death is a debt which every one of us must pay.”
3.5/5
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book reader. Specifically, I am not a WWI/WWII historical fiction reader. Some part of my brain was oversaturated with watered down romanticized versions of those wars specifically a while ago and I have had a bit of an aversion ever since. However, I was in a mood (depressed and ready to be emotionally destroyed), and this book filled that void for me well. I read this book in approximately nine hours, finishing as the sun began to rise. I laughed, I cried, I felt. I read this fast and I wanted my soul to be ripped to shreds. While this was what I needed and I couldn’t put it down, there were parts that were nagging me, begging me to critique. Just know (speaking to you, mags, don’t combust) that I did have an emotional 9 hours with this book, and if I ever feel compelled to read this again, the rating may go up.
“But Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt… feared that ugliness was too important to ignore.”
The focal point of this is book is war and how war changes people and that part seems to be very well and thoroughly discussed. Ellwood has always had idealistic dreams about war, believing what was written in the in memoriam’s for his old classmates and dreaming of a noble battle while quoting Tennyson constantly. Gaunt hates the war and has some ability to see through to the ugly truth of war and doesn’t want to fight. During one of the first times Ellwood sees combat, he turns to Gaunt and says, “ ‘I want to go home. . . We’re not nineteen yet, we could still go home. . .’ ” The war is never glamorized nor is it just used as a backdrop, the affect it has on people is at the forefront of the story. As the fighting continues and the in memoriams of the friends we briefly met pile up, the pain is always felt strongly. I have heard that a lot of the in memoriams and depictions of war are pulled pretty directly from the books that Winn cites as inspiration, I am not sure how true that is as I have not read them, but that is something I would like to note.
“You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless.”
In Memoriam opens at an all-boys boarding school (a setting I am quite a sucker for) in England, where rich boys discuss the War as if it is the most glorious thing to happen, while the deaths of their older peers who are already in the trenches slowly trickle in through the school newspaper. I am a sucker for a good boarding school and was excited to get to know this (very large) cast of characters in an intimate way through their boarding school life before we got into the war. The biggest complaint I have with this book was that everything moved so fast. There was no time to grab hold of anything. I have a feeling this may have been intentional, to show how little time we have, especially when young men are going off to war and their lives end before they even had a chance to begin, but I found that this also meant that the introductions to characters (even our main ones) and their dynamics were a bit weak. I chalk this up in part to Winn’s fanfiction origins (which I promise I have nothing wrong with, I love a good fanfiction) as in a fanfiction setting characters are already more established so there is less of a need to delve into a character before the action of the story starts. The introduction was so quick I felt like I was getting a bit of whiplash as I expected that Elly and Gaunt would have a little more time to develop and that part 1, approximately third of the book, would be focused only on school, alas Winn moved fast and there was no time for pleasantries I suppose. While I did find this book heartbreaking, I do think that Winn was relying a bit on works that came before her to pull at the heart strings during the set-up period. The War was harrowing, but the I was left wanting with the emotions of youth before we got into the thick of it and found that the relationship between them was the weakest part of the book for me because of the lack of time I had to watch them together. Additionally, I found some of their later dialogue to be a bit. . . well it was clear she wrote drarry fanfiction is the best way I can put it. I found myself being the least interested in their later parts together, in part due to this.
“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man’s Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
The letters from Gaunt to Ellwood while he was on the front line and how we see how much Gaunt censored even for Ellwood once he is on the front himself are an important, yet painfully short part of this book. Again, there were months of letters and I felt as though these were so rushed, I wish we got a little bit more of this development. Nonetheless, seeing the juxtaposition of how Gaunt wrote to Elly, his time in the trenches, and how he wrote to his friend, a soldier on the front lines elsewhere, was harrowing and a great way to show the difference in what soldiers experienced versus what they whittled down and kept inside.
“He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him. . . It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.”
Ellwood is the character that we watch change the most throughout this book, and it is a particularly heartbreaking yet realistic portrait, especially of a man who has lost so many people and who doesn’t know how to do anything but fight anymore. Watching him move from a hopeful youth to violent, erratic, and scared was heartbreaking in a way that I don’t think I anticipated (which is a bit silly of me as this is a book about war).
“It was hard to look at him and remember all the years they had spent together, not knowing what violence awaited them.”
Again, I do really wish we got to spend a bit more time with these boys before the horrors of war caught up to them—this really would’ve benefitted from having a hundred or so more pages focused on that—but watching the change and then deaths of these boys, who I may not have remembered when they were first reintroduced, but damn did I not forget them after that, was especially hard hitting. The juxtaposition of knowing how most of them died versus seeing their in memoriams was also heartbreaking. At the end Winn stated that she directly lifted a lot of in memoriams from actual papers during WWI, which I do think was smart, but does make me wonder how much of Winn’s work I actually loved versus how much of it was lifted from actual WWI stuff. I’m still trying to decide if it makes a difference.
“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how hard he tried.”
I thought that I had more of an emotional connection to Gaunt and Ellwood before I got to the last part, and then I realized that the swiftness of the first part of the novel had left me a bit. . . empty in regards to their relationship. I could see inklings of it, but it wasn’t as fleshed out as I had imagined it would be. Winn did an excellent job at tugging at my heartstrings during everything except this aspect, where I felt left wanting more. Even as I write this, I am thinking that maybe someone will comment about how that was part of her intention, so I will clarify. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted more of them together, it was that I wanted to want more of them; I wanted to feel their yearning, their pain, to feel how, while the War had taken so much from them and that they had to shove it down, this was the breaking point for them. I still cared, and was a bit heartbroken, but I wanted a bit more. I think apart of this was the fact that part II, while important, seemed to stretch on forever and it made the pacing feel a bit off. Maybe it was supposed to, but I cannot help but feel that it detracted something that I was supposed to feel deeply.
“ ‘War is. . . a violent teacher?’ he said, eventually. Gaunt smiled at him, ‘That’s right.’ The countryside streamed greenly past the windows. ‘It didn’t teach me anything,’ said Ellwood.”
The end of this book is quite devastating, yet hopeful in a bit of a sad way. I think it shows well how no one is the same after war, how, even if you survive, you are nothing near the same man you were. There is little comfort after the war ends, but there is a little hope of brighter days. Despite my critiques of it, I found it to be quite moving especially in the portrayal of war. I really did appreciate this for what it was, I think I’ve just found other media to be more moving for me in terms of actual queer relationships, and I went into this expecting to be a bit more moved by that aspect of the story.
“Death is a debt which every one of us must pay.”
3.5/5
August 25, 2023
Now winner of the Waterstones Prize for Debut Fiction.
I finally got around to reading this novel which is already being widely quoted by many respected Bookstagramers, Booktubers and Goodreads friends as their Book of the Year – and being tipped for a number of prize nominations (the first of which came the day I completed it with a shortlisting for the second year of the newly influential Waterstone’s Prize for Debut Fiction) – including the Booker Prize.
And I have to say that while I can see what made the book appealing to many readers I was not particularly whelmed with it – particularly viewing it as a potential Booker contender as I felt it told an already over-represented take on World War I from a very priviliged/establishment viewpoint, was rather derivative in its writing, and lacked literary merit in some respects.
Starting with the undoubted strong points of the novel – (Sidney) Elwood and (Henry) Grant are strong characters and the difficult developments of their relationship provides the impulse to the novel. In some ways this could be said to be a classic Victorian relationship novel – both secretly in love with the other but convinced that the other is not interested in them and both unwilling to share their feelings; but with a number of variations: the societal and legal barriers to same sex relationships; the brutality and (we would say now) toxic masculinity of single sex Boarding schools – where homosexual sexual encounters are common but never acknowledged publicly – other than as slander – and never expressed in terms of finer feelings even privately; the terrible impact of the horrors of the Great War in terms of changing hierarchies and leaving permanent psychological an physical scars which then play out against an already difficult relationship.
The novel as an aside seems to make a calculated post to capture the “Song of Achilles” BookTok hype by literally having Gaunt enact a Hector and Achilles scene while a POW.
The way in which the story is bookended (and littered throughout) with titular extracts from The Preshutian – the in house newspaper of the exclusive Presuhute Public school works effectively to get across the huge attrition of the war (particularly in the junior officer classes), the tragically young age of its participants and victims, and the mix of stiff upper lip bravado, incitement to others to join and grief which each death produced. I can see also for those who perhaps followed the side-characters more closely than me that scanning the honour lists themselves to see which characters survived was an effective way of conveying a little of that impact on the reader.
Preshute is based on Malborough College (and is the borrowed name of one of the colleges there) – one of the most elite and expensive, establishment creating fee paying schools in the UK; now open to women establishment alumni for example include Kate Middleton, Samantha Cameron and Princess Eugenie and the In Memoriam articles based on those actually published in the college’s own magazine at the time of the Great War.
And the German descended Elwood, part Jewish but culturally Christian and a poet is based on Siegfried Sassoon – another Marlborough Alumni the Marlborough connections reflecting the background of the also Oxford educated author. Gaunt in turn based on Robert Graves – perhaps with even stronger German connections.
And we have a novel which views World War I from the point of view of public school educated, classics loving and poetry writing men – a view that has already coloured interpretations of the war. And as a result two characters who for example when fleeing a prisoner of war camp can draw on old school connections to contact the British ambassador in Holland; or post war when wanting somewhere they can have a non-illegal relationship, can draw on similar connections to procure a cushy job in liberal Brazil.
The novel seemed to me as I read it to draw on pretty well every World War I fictional archetype going – even some ones perhaps more associated with World War II like the jolly japes of plotting prison escapes – and the acknowledgements make clear the wide ranges of sources liberally borrowed from.
The plot itself hinges crucially on Elwood rather rapidly abandoning Gaunt as dead without checking.
And the writing I found first of all far too heavy on dialogue (written on a very conventional way) over description or interiority; and too reliant on chapter ending cliffhangers. One chapter - after a failed tunnel escape, of course borrowed from another account - for example ends “And then Gaunt could hear the others in the basement room including - his heart quailed - the unmistakeable sound of German” which surely needed a judicious edit.
So overall a book I can see why people admire but not one I hope to see in contention for more literary prizes.
Ellwood folded up the letter and put it into his pocket, glancing around at his bedroom. It was the nicest he'd had at Preshute, and he would miss it. Gaunt always said hed lived a charmed life. It was true that Ellwood found most things easy: people liked him, he was good at sports, good at lessons. He had never been seriously teased nor bullied, despite the obvious reasons he might have been. Gaunt, meanwhile, had struggled along until he got so tall and strong and impenetrable that no one could hurt him. Gaunt, in fact, represented the only real trial Ellwood had ever gone through. Unrequited love was a difficult thing to live with, but Elwood managed because Gaunt needed him.
He had never really known how much. This letter was not the way he would have chosen to discover the depths to which he was embedded in Gaunts soul.
I finally got around to reading this novel which is already being widely quoted by many respected Bookstagramers, Booktubers and Goodreads friends as their Book of the Year – and being tipped for a number of prize nominations (the first of which came the day I completed it with a shortlisting for the second year of the newly influential Waterstone’s Prize for Debut Fiction) – including the Booker Prize.
And I have to say that while I can see what made the book appealing to many readers I was not particularly whelmed with it – particularly viewing it as a potential Booker contender as I felt it told an already over-represented take on World War I from a very priviliged/establishment viewpoint, was rather derivative in its writing, and lacked literary merit in some respects.
Starting with the undoubted strong points of the novel – (Sidney) Elwood and (Henry) Grant are strong characters and the difficult developments of their relationship provides the impulse to the novel. In some ways this could be said to be a classic Victorian relationship novel – both secretly in love with the other but convinced that the other is not interested in them and both unwilling to share their feelings; but with a number of variations: the societal and legal barriers to same sex relationships; the brutality and (we would say now) toxic masculinity of single sex Boarding schools – where homosexual sexual encounters are common but never acknowledged publicly – other than as slander – and never expressed in terms of finer feelings even privately; the terrible impact of the horrors of the Great War in terms of changing hierarchies and leaving permanent psychological an physical scars which then play out against an already difficult relationship.
The novel as an aside seems to make a calculated post to capture the “Song of Achilles” BookTok hype by literally having Gaunt enact a Hector and Achilles scene while a POW.
The way in which the story is bookended (and littered throughout) with titular extracts from The Preshutian – the in house newspaper of the exclusive Presuhute Public school works effectively to get across the huge attrition of the war (particularly in the junior officer classes), the tragically young age of its participants and victims, and the mix of stiff upper lip bravado, incitement to others to join and grief which each death produced. I can see also for those who perhaps followed the side-characters more closely than me that scanning the honour lists themselves to see which characters survived was an effective way of conveying a little of that impact on the reader.
Preshute is based on Malborough College (and is the borrowed name of one of the colleges there) – one of the most elite and expensive, establishment creating fee paying schools in the UK; now open to women establishment alumni for example include Kate Middleton, Samantha Cameron and Princess Eugenie and the In Memoriam articles based on those actually published in the college’s own magazine at the time of the Great War.
And the German descended Elwood, part Jewish but culturally Christian and a poet is based on Siegfried Sassoon – another Marlborough Alumni the Marlborough connections reflecting the background of the also Oxford educated author. Gaunt in turn based on Robert Graves – perhaps with even stronger German connections.
And we have a novel which views World War I from the point of view of public school educated, classics loving and poetry writing men – a view that has already coloured interpretations of the war. And as a result two characters who for example when fleeing a prisoner of war camp can draw on old school connections to contact the British ambassador in Holland; or post war when wanting somewhere they can have a non-illegal relationship, can draw on similar connections to procure a cushy job in liberal Brazil.
The novel seemed to me as I read it to draw on pretty well every World War I fictional archetype going – even some ones perhaps more associated with World War II like the jolly japes of plotting prison escapes – and the acknowledgements make clear the wide ranges of sources liberally borrowed from.
The plot itself hinges crucially on Elwood rather rapidly abandoning Gaunt as dead without checking.
And the writing I found first of all far too heavy on dialogue (written on a very conventional way) over description or interiority; and too reliant on chapter ending cliffhangers. One chapter - after a failed tunnel escape, of course borrowed from another account - for example ends “And then Gaunt could hear the others in the basement room including - his heart quailed - the unmistakeable sound of German” which surely needed a judicious edit.
So overall a book I can see why people admire but not one I hope to see in contention for more literary prizes.
September 5, 2023
me before starting: i hope this pummels me into a pulp
me now, battered and bruised: please sir let me p e r i s h
1914. two english schoolboys—gaunt & ellwood—harbour a secret love for each other. when gaunt bites the bullet & enlists, he’s thrown into the ceaseless violence of world war I only for ellwood to follow. in a grim reality surrounded by death, it begs the question: how does love follow?
the thing is: i didn’t take a single breath while reading in memoriam.
i can’t let this novel go. everyday i go back, flipping through the pages—somehow already tabbed to hell & back—running fingers over lines of text. feels dramatic to say i can etch it all into my brain & it still won’t be enough. saying i love in memoriam hardly feels sufficient.
something about two boys & the depth of a love, the quiet yearning through the wall, so afraid to give into what it means to love another. feels poetic in the most agonizing way to say a book set in the war is, at its heart, about love. less about a love forming than a love being tested.
something about the juxtaposition between the vivid horrors of war—the gore, the grief, what it does to people. strip them of their boyhood, force them to grow into men. watch how brutality tries to mar that love, then witness that insistent tenderness bent on growing through the cracks. each letter & poem—something delicate persisting. the moments of gentle understanding & a sense of mutual awe to it. every hesitant touch, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.
when you think books about war & incessant violence, you think patroclus & achilles, hercules, hector. you don’t breathe because you know how brief each moment of happiness is, only for it not to be the end of the story. do it & you disturb the peace, popping the already fragile bubble that they try to create for themselves. how sacred that feels in such a high stakes environment.
i might be so bold as to say in memoriam has one of my favorite endings. a final look at that loss of innocence and one beautiful & reverent constant—their love for each other. maybe i'll just never breathe again. being giving the smallest hope and holding on, waiting forever.
me now, battered and bruised: please sir let me p e r i s h
“what i meant to say is this: you’ll write more poems. they are not lost. you are the poetry.
yours, gaunt”
1914. two english schoolboys—gaunt & ellwood—harbour a secret love for each other. when gaunt bites the bullet & enlists, he’s thrown into the ceaseless violence of world war I only for ellwood to follow. in a grim reality surrounded by death, it begs the question: how does love follow?
the thing is: i didn’t take a single breath while reading in memoriam.
i can’t let this novel go. everyday i go back, flipping through the pages—somehow already tabbed to hell & back—running fingers over lines of text. feels dramatic to say i can etch it all into my brain & it still won’t be enough. saying i love in memoriam hardly feels sufficient.
something about two boys & the depth of a love, the quiet yearning through the wall, so afraid to give into what it means to love another. feels poetic in the most agonizing way to say a book set in the war is, at its heart, about love. less about a love forming than a love being tested.
something about the juxtaposition between the vivid horrors of war—the gore, the grief, what it does to people. strip them of their boyhood, force them to grow into men. watch how brutality tries to mar that love, then witness that insistent tenderness bent on growing through the cracks. each letter & poem—something delicate persisting. the moments of gentle understanding & a sense of mutual awe to it. every hesitant touch, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.
when you think books about war & incessant violence, you think patroclus & achilles, hercules, hector. you don’t breathe because you know how brief each moment of happiness is, only for it not to be the end of the story. do it & you disturb the peace, popping the already fragile bubble that they try to create for themselves. how sacred that feels in such a high stakes environment.
i might be so bold as to say in memoriam has one of my favorite endings. a final look at that loss of innocence and one beautiful & reverent constant—their love for each other. maybe i'll just never breathe again. being giving the smallest hope and holding on, waiting forever.
May 23, 2024
For once, I am truly, wholeheartedly, at a loss for words.
I truly believe I can not write my thoughts and emotions eloquently.
I shall simply say that this is quite possibly the most remarkable book I have read in years, if not ever. By no means is this a book for everyone, and if I had known the emotions I would have felt reading this, I quite possibly would have left it unread. However, I am mightily pleased to have completed this book with a whole box of tissues, copious glasses of wine, and regular comfort hugs from my husband.
I was laughing, crying, heartbroken, horrified, appalled, heart broken, love sick, and I never ever ever have connected to two characters so much as I did to our dearest Sidney and Henry.
I will end my simple review by saying that Sidney, Henry, Cyril, Davi, and all the boys really will forever stay with me.
"I want to go home," sobbed Ellwood
Some long-dead poet must have written the lines with which to answer, but Ellwood no longer knew them. ~This line broke me, and I do believe that Ellwood will find his poets again.
I truly believe I can not write my thoughts and emotions eloquently.
I shall simply say that this is quite possibly the most remarkable book I have read in years, if not ever. By no means is this a book for everyone, and if I had known the emotions I would have felt reading this, I quite possibly would have left it unread. However, I am mightily pleased to have completed this book with a whole box of tissues, copious glasses of wine, and regular comfort hugs from my husband.
I was laughing, crying, heartbroken, horrified, appalled, heart broken, love sick, and I never ever ever have connected to two characters so much as I did to our dearest Sidney and Henry.
I will end my simple review by saying that Sidney, Henry, Cyril, Davi, and all the boys really will forever stay with me.
"I want to go home," sobbed Ellwood
Some long-dead poet must have written the lines with which to answer, but Ellwood no longer knew them. ~This line broke me, and I do believe that Ellwood will find his poets again.
December 30, 2023
***** 5 Stars *****
Absolutely brutal.
I've been mulling over what to say about this because it's still lingering on my mind.
I'll start by saying I am not a reader who shies away from emotionally challenging reads. I have a simple coping mechanism when reading uncomfortable stories, as long as I know I am reading a fictional book, I can deal with it.
But goddammit, In Memoriam was hard. It hit too close to home. 💔
I was constantly relating this story to what is happening in the world right now and it was overwhelming. I mean, this war in 2023,
In Memoriam was not a perfect read for me.
✔️I wished for more romance than wartime.
✔️I resent how graphic the story was presented, but at the same time, there was this morbid feeling of knowing the truth. And the author made this so bloody vivid!
✔️And there were a couple of convenient coincidences.
Now, the praise:
The story gripped me from the start. The writing is gorgeous! Not to mention the character's development. The way the author portrayed the MCs, slowly changing their personalities in tune with the story progression was mind-blowing.
From carefree to a shell of their former selves.
I was incredibly touched by Ellwood and Gaunt's love story.
There were other aspects of this book which were also incredibly good, such as authenticity, the side characters AND (never thought I would say that) the poetry.
I have a penchant for finding ugly stories beautiful.
October 4, 2023
Rating this two stars, "It was okay," but in truth, it's more accurate to say that this book was BARELY okay. I was very surprised, as I very much looked forward to this book long before it came out. I thought this book was going to shine, as it had many elements that would have presupposed a very high rating from me. However, I found the tale a monumental "failure-to-launch," which says a lot, and not in a good way, about an LGBTQ+ story set during WWI.
The worst part was the middle part, which read like a very bad and uninformed mashup, I felt, of "Hogan's Heroes" and "The Great Escape." It was drudgery getting through this part. The book had already been disappointing before then, and so I barely made it to the finish line. That all said, there will be many who will love and cherish this book, but for my money, "The Absolutist" by John Boyne is an immensely better read.
Many thanks to #NetGalley for a free e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
The worst part was the middle part, which read like a very bad and uninformed mashup, I felt, of "Hogan's Heroes" and "The Great Escape." It was drudgery getting through this part. The book had already been disappointing before then, and so I barely made it to the finish line. That all said, there will be many who will love and cherish this book, but for my money, "The Absolutist" by John Boyne is an immensely better read.
Many thanks to #NetGalley for a free e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
December 20, 2022
Just before WW1, two idealistic boys meet at boarding school, they’re attracted to each other but don’t dare to admit it. In their world fumbling, casual sex between boys is sanctioned - as long as it remains hidden - but love’s completely out of the question. Worldly, Londoner Gaunt and innocent, country boy Ellwood are inseparable, sharing a fascination for poetry and the ancient Greeks. But then war breaks out and Gaunt’s German ancestry forces him to declare his loyalty to England by joining up and it’s not long before they’re both contending with the maelstrom of the trenches.
Alice Winn’s debut novel’s solid, well-researched, historical fiction with a queer slant, partly inspired by work like R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End. Winn’s narrative takes a while to take off, especially in the early stages when it moves between the boarding-school and the war in France. Inevitably too there are shades of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker but Winn’s writing’s less self-consciously lyrical then Faulks and less considered than Barker’s.
Winn’s story’s very visual and quite dialogue heavy – her background’s in screenwriting. But it’s also unexpectedly inventive, an intriguing mash-up of genres from the literary to the cinematic, taking in the ripping yarns that inspired boys to fight and borrowing from the conventions of M/M romance to frame Gaunt and Ellwood’s unfolding relationship. It’s also pleasingly diverse highlighting the lesser-known groups who fought in WW1 from the Indian to the Algerian forces who served and, often, died on its battlefields. Some of this diversity can feel a little forced - Ellwood’s experience as a Jewish soldier, Gaunt’s German background foregrounding the losses on both sides - some of the characters can tip towards stock and some of the plot points are contrived. But as it unfolds the pace picks up and there are a number of surprisingly powerful episodes, as well as an entertaining Buchan-like air of derring-do driving later prison camp sequences. I’m not a fan of M/M romance so those elements of Gaunt and Ellwood’s love story didn’t really work for me, they felt a lot less authentic than Barker’s representations of queer experiences of WW1; and, like a lot of first novels, I felt this could have been edited down but overall, it’s a smart, vivid, fairly gripping piece that’s bound to have a wide appeal.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Viking/Penguin Random House for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
Alice Winn’s debut novel’s solid, well-researched, historical fiction with a queer slant, partly inspired by work like R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End. Winn’s narrative takes a while to take off, especially in the early stages when it moves between the boarding-school and the war in France. Inevitably too there are shades of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker but Winn’s writing’s less self-consciously lyrical then Faulks and less considered than Barker’s.
Winn’s story’s very visual and quite dialogue heavy – her background’s in screenwriting. But it’s also unexpectedly inventive, an intriguing mash-up of genres from the literary to the cinematic, taking in the ripping yarns that inspired boys to fight and borrowing from the conventions of M/M romance to frame Gaunt and Ellwood’s unfolding relationship. It’s also pleasingly diverse highlighting the lesser-known groups who fought in WW1 from the Indian to the Algerian forces who served and, often, died on its battlefields. Some of this diversity can feel a little forced - Ellwood’s experience as a Jewish soldier, Gaunt’s German background foregrounding the losses on both sides - some of the characters can tip towards stock and some of the plot points are contrived. But as it unfolds the pace picks up and there are a number of surprisingly powerful episodes, as well as an entertaining Buchan-like air of derring-do driving later prison camp sequences. I’m not a fan of M/M romance so those elements of Gaunt and Ellwood’s love story didn’t really work for me, they felt a lot less authentic than Barker’s representations of queer experiences of WW1; and, like a lot of first novels, I felt this could have been edited down but overall, it’s a smart, vivid, fairly gripping piece that’s bound to have a wide appeal.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Viking/Penguin Random House for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
November 10, 2023
Trzy noce nie spałam, bo czytałam o biednych chłopcach na I wojnie światowej.
October 23, 2023
Love story between two english upper class teenage boys set during world war I, with lots about their very posh (fictional) boarding school, and quoting poetry at each other and obviously world war I. A book which turns out to be very different from expected (the cover does it a disservice, I think) - going by reviews in a good way for many many of its readers, but it ended up being a lot more, well, fanfic-style than I ever expected it to.
A few chapters in I was so sure the author had read, written a lot of fanfic. Googling it, and yes, she did, deleted them and scrubbed it, and quite popular ones apparently (AO3 profile deleted, but goodreads which is not even meant to be used for that still lists still 12 works, and 651 ratings. Her fandoms seemed to have been Harry+Draco and Simon and Baz).
So basically this is going to be World War I british upper class gay love story but written by somebody who loves Harry-Draco fanfic and whose skills were honed by writing fanfic. That was basically my problem with it, it was intolerably shallow for the setting, what it was writing about, what I was told this book was about. (I am not saying this is a pulled to publish, serial numbers filed off work, just that this is written in the style and with the the sensibilities typical of AO3 work... Which might actually be great for a few things, but were not a good fit for the themes this book approaches. At least for me as a reader).
This made me think a lot on lots of things for which I can not find answers to present properly, like:
- what is fanfic? Well, I knew when it saw it (took me a few chapters though), nobody told me beforehand...
- is it being fanfic inherently bad? Of course not on itself. It can be the wrong approach to some stories;
- enjoyable versus being good (uh, different things?);
- what being a good book is about (it is not the endorphins of pleasing stuff happening, I think...)
- what literature as concept even means (I think it exists and it is important and it is not like an election where majority vote wins, but yeah some books are objectively better, more important but I do not want to read all literary all the time, but still..);
- Am I a book snob? (whatever, in the end I do not care either way. I am very certain of my feelings about some books, including this one);
- Plot armors in general and so on.
The framework for this book, as discussed in the NYTimes is particularly moving, how the author when reading the issues of her boarding school newspaper printed during world war I was struck by the obituaries there. That framework is really memorable and moving. But the main narrative became more obvious with each chapter and it was so very shallow (incidentally, I loved and cried at Blackadder Goes Forth. And Johnny and the Dead) in a way which did not mesh at all with the themes, not just the horror of war, and that war specifically but even the theme of say, our main characters being gay in 1910s Britain Also while it addresses what was likely realistic boarding school conditions at the time, bullying, abuse, sexual abuse, I also thought it addressed it far more shallowly than it should.
I keep referencing fanfic, and well, it does have the readability one would expect. It's a fast moving book. I actually thought the ending was a bit rushed and a bit too vignette like, but well, fanfic writers...
I can see it being immensely popular easily though. (One more question to which I have no answer, is it OK to recommend a book you really did not like and do not respect to friends, if you think they will like it? Probably not. But my issues with this book are clearly in a minority...)
A few chapters in I was so sure the author had read, written a lot of fanfic. Googling it, and yes, she did, deleted them and scrubbed it, and quite popular ones apparently (AO3 profile deleted, but goodreads which is not even meant to be used for that still lists still 12 works, and 651 ratings. Her fandoms seemed to have been Harry+Draco and Simon and Baz).
So basically this is going to be World War I british upper class gay love story but written by somebody who loves Harry-Draco fanfic and whose skills were honed by writing fanfic. That was basically my problem with it, it was intolerably shallow for the setting, what it was writing about, what I was told this book was about. (I am not saying this is a pulled to publish, serial numbers filed off work, just that this is written in the style and with the the sensibilities typical of AO3 work... Which might actually be great for a few things, but were not a good fit for the themes this book approaches. At least for me as a reader).
This made me think a lot on lots of things for which I can not find answers to present properly, like:
- what is fanfic? Well, I knew when it saw it (took me a few chapters though), nobody told me beforehand...
- is it being fanfic inherently bad? Of course not on itself. It can be the wrong approach to some stories;
- enjoyable versus being good (uh, different things?);
- what being a good book is about (it is not the endorphins of pleasing stuff happening, I think...)
- what literature as concept even means (I think it exists and it is important and it is not like an election where majority vote wins, but yeah some books are objectively better, more important but I do not want to read all literary all the time, but still..);
- Am I a book snob? (whatever, in the end I do not care either way. I am very certain of my feelings about some books, including this one);
- Plot armors in general and so on.
The framework for this book, as discussed in the NYTimes is particularly moving, how the author when reading the issues of her boarding school newspaper printed during world war I was struck by the obituaries there. That framework is really memorable and moving. But the main narrative became more obvious with each chapter and it was so very shallow (incidentally, I loved and cried at Blackadder Goes Forth. And Johnny and the Dead) in a way which did not mesh at all with the themes, not just the horror of war, and that war specifically but even the theme of say, our main characters being gay in 1910s Britain Also while it addresses what was likely realistic boarding school conditions at the time, bullying, abuse, sexual abuse, I also thought it addressed it far more shallowly than it should.
I keep referencing fanfic, and well, it does have the readability one would expect. It's a fast moving book. I actually thought the ending was a bit rushed and a bit too vignette like, but well, fanfic writers...
I can see it being immensely popular easily though. (One more question to which I have no answer, is it OK to recommend a book you really did not like and do not respect to friends, if you think they will like it? Probably not. But my issues with this book are clearly in a minority...)
November 25, 2023
I didn't think, not now, not in this moment of incendiary division and desperation, when the world is crumpling under the weight of anger and battle fatigue, that I could have the emotional wherewithal to read a novel of war. Certainly not one that mired me in the trenches and barbed wire of the mass homicide that was World War I.
But I wasn't expecting this.
Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, is astonishing. At once breathtakingly epic and intimate, it explores in graphic, intense detail the horrors of battle and with tender, awkward and sensuous encounters, the delirious joy of physical desire and first love.
In the fall of 1914, the public school boys at Preshute — an elite academy that is a peer of Eton and Harrow — comb the school newspaper's new column, In Memoriam, for the notices of classmates who were killed, injured or are missing in action, newly-made heroes of this new war. In their plummy accents, these boys express their admiration for their fallen comrades and their longing to be at the front fighting for God and Country. But they fear their time may not come, for this war is certain to be settled by Christmas and they will have to settle for stories told by older brothers and graduated classmates.
We all know, as we read with dread, that many of these boys will soon lose their lives in a war that would stretch on for another four years. If they survived, many more would suffer grievous injury, physical and mental. Nearly one million British forces died, nearly two million were injured. It's impossible to grasp the devastation these numbers represent, but In Memoriam makes the inhumane achingly real.
The story centers around two Preshute friends: the charismatic and charmed Sidney "Elly" Ellwood and enigmatic, handsome Henry Gaunt. Their close friendship ripples with unrequited love and Winn captures the longing and confusion of these young men, laced with the accepted cruelties of boarding school life, the unavoidable agony of coming of age and the impossibility of "coming out" at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison sentence. Both men enlist at the age of eighteen and become officers by virtue of their social status. Through these characters, we are taken into the trenches, the battlefields, the prison camps, hospitals, tunnels, the unimaginable horrors of war.
In Memoriam lands in my canon of great war literature, alongside works by Barbara Tuchman, Karl Marlantes, William Styron, Tim O'Brien, Sebastian Barry. It is beautifully written, an extraordinary achievement for the specificity of war history and combat scenes and the intricacies of class, sexuality, and the mapping of the human heart.
One of the year's best. Very best. Highly recommended.
But I wasn't expecting this.
Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, is astonishing. At once breathtakingly epic and intimate, it explores in graphic, intense detail the horrors of battle and with tender, awkward and sensuous encounters, the delirious joy of physical desire and first love.
In the fall of 1914, the public school boys at Preshute — an elite academy that is a peer of Eton and Harrow — comb the school newspaper's new column, In Memoriam, for the notices of classmates who were killed, injured or are missing in action, newly-made heroes of this new war. In their plummy accents, these boys express their admiration for their fallen comrades and their longing to be at the front fighting for God and Country. But they fear their time may not come, for this war is certain to be settled by Christmas and they will have to settle for stories told by older brothers and graduated classmates.
We all know, as we read with dread, that many of these boys will soon lose their lives in a war that would stretch on for another four years. If they survived, many more would suffer grievous injury, physical and mental. Nearly one million British forces died, nearly two million were injured. It's impossible to grasp the devastation these numbers represent, but In Memoriam makes the inhumane achingly real.
The story centers around two Preshute friends: the charismatic and charmed Sidney "Elly" Ellwood and enigmatic, handsome Henry Gaunt. Their close friendship ripples with unrequited love and Winn captures the longing and confusion of these young men, laced with the accepted cruelties of boarding school life, the unavoidable agony of coming of age and the impossibility of "coming out" at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison sentence. Both men enlist at the age of eighteen and become officers by virtue of their social status. Through these characters, we are taken into the trenches, the battlefields, the prison camps, hospitals, tunnels, the unimaginable horrors of war.
In Memoriam lands in my canon of great war literature, alongside works by Barbara Tuchman, Karl Marlantes, William Styron, Tim O'Brien, Sebastian Barry. It is beautifully written, an extraordinary achievement for the specificity of war history and combat scenes and the intricacies of class, sexuality, and the mapping of the human heart.
One of the year's best. Very best. Highly recommended.
October 26, 2022
5+++* Stars
Oh, my heart ❤️
I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this. It's an M/M story, but not one you'll recognise. It's set in the run up to, and during, World War 1. The MCs are a pair of privileged teenagers who are in denial of their feelings for each other - then war breaks out, and they leave behind their private educations to fight. The title comes from their school's newspaper, where the 'In Memoriam' section is referenced often during the book.
It's an incredibly poignant, raw, real, and moving read. I'll warn you that this book doesn't shy away from realism. There's a lot of angst, a LOT of death, gore and graphic descriptions of injuries, characters with severe mental health issues, and heavy use of weapons - but don't let this put you off. It's like a breath of fresh air to read something so real and something that isn't just mushy and romanticised. I think my generation especially have never known anything like what our ancestors went through, and the author does a great job of capturing this beautifully. Parts of it actually educated me, and I found myself reading up and learning more about aspects of the war that I'd never known about before throughout.
It's very well written - parts I'd even describe as poetic. This author is extremely talented and has clearly put a lot of effort into her research. The romance between the MCs is fairly slow burn and SO beautiful. They spend a lot of time apart during the book, and my heart broke SO much SO many times when they were thinking of and worried about each other 😭. This story is heartbreaking, and you will cry (a lot, if you're like me.)
I'd also say there's a slight sexuality awakening, although this is in part due to the expectations and pressures people would have faced during that time to marry. Something I REALLY loved about this story were the scenes where other characters reacted to learning of the MCs sexualities - there was one scene in particular that really stood out for me, and it was beautiful. My heart melted (if you've read it, you'll know 🥺). There are some steamier scenes too, not many I'll add, but they're really enjoyable and do a great job of portraying the connection and bond between the characters.
The pacing was also perfectly executed - I literally couldn't put this book down from start to finish - don't start this late at night, as you'll probably be reading it right through till Dawn 😂 This book deserves to become a classic, 5 stars doesn't feel like enough.
TL:DR - In Memoriam is a beautiful, heartfelt, poignant story of love and loss during WW1. While others have written about the war before, no other book is like this. It's like a breath of fresh air. If you read it, expect to laugh, cry (a lot), and go through a rollercoaster of emotions. You'll also most likely learn things about the First World War that you never knew about along the way. This is a book you simply can't miss.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with this ARC. This is my honest review.
Oh, my heart ❤️
I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this. It's an M/M story, but not one you'll recognise. It's set in the run up to, and during, World War 1. The MCs are a pair of privileged teenagers who are in denial of their feelings for each other - then war breaks out, and they leave behind their private educations to fight. The title comes from their school's newspaper, where the 'In Memoriam' section is referenced often during the book.
It's an incredibly poignant, raw, real, and moving read. I'll warn you that this book doesn't shy away from realism. There's a lot of angst, a LOT of death, gore and graphic descriptions of injuries, characters with severe mental health issues, and heavy use of weapons - but don't let this put you off. It's like a breath of fresh air to read something so real and something that isn't just mushy and romanticised. I think my generation especially have never known anything like what our ancestors went through, and the author does a great job of capturing this beautifully. Parts of it actually educated me, and I found myself reading up and learning more about aspects of the war that I'd never known about before throughout.
It's very well written - parts I'd even describe as poetic. This author is extremely talented and has clearly put a lot of effort into her research. The romance between the MCs is fairly slow burn and SO beautiful. They spend a lot of time apart during the book, and my heart broke SO much SO many times when they were thinking of and worried about each other 😭. This story is heartbreaking, and you will cry (a lot, if you're like me.)
I'd also say there's a slight sexuality awakening, although this is in part due to the expectations and pressures people would have faced during that time to marry. Something I REALLY loved about this story were the scenes where other characters reacted to learning of the MCs sexualities - there was one scene in particular that really stood out for me, and it was beautiful. My heart melted (if you've read it, you'll know 🥺). There are some steamier scenes too, not many I'll add, but they're really enjoyable and do a great job of portraying the connection and bond between the characters.
The pacing was also perfectly executed - I literally couldn't put this book down from start to finish - don't start this late at night, as you'll probably be reading it right through till Dawn 😂 This book deserves to become a classic, 5 stars doesn't feel like enough.
TL:DR - In Memoriam is a beautiful, heartfelt, poignant story of love and loss during WW1. While others have written about the war before, no other book is like this. It's like a breath of fresh air. If you read it, expect to laugh, cry (a lot), and go through a rollercoaster of emotions. You'll also most likely learn things about the First World War that you never knew about along the way. This is a book you simply can't miss.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with this ARC. This is my honest review.
April 29, 2023
WW I was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, as is no secret. Alice Winn became inspired after running across a historical treasure trove of documents: a digitized version of her boarding school’s newspaper from the early twentieth century, listing casualties from The Great War and the students who were killed or wounded fighting for Britain. The newspaper, as she showed in her book, had that old-fashioned large font, the Gazette-ish layout and direct announcements. The pedigreed students from Marlborough College put down their poetry books and highbrow hi-jinx and joined up, writing letters home that romanticized the war. Their valor carried them through, but eventually hit a wall when all their classmates started dying at the front. Winn peppered the novel with pages from the newspaper, which nearly seemed trumpeted (in an ironic and tragic way), but was actually quite raw in its frank portrayal of maimed and dead soldiers.
The characterizations are A plus, palpably authentic. Her main characters, Sidney “Elly” Ellwood and Henry (Heinrich, half-German and half-British) Gaunt, meet at boarding school and fall in love, but aren’t confident enough to tell one another. Winn has a feisty and fulsome talent for meticulously depicting the people who populate the story. Even with a posh school of mostly rich white British teens, they are separate and distinct individuals. The ones who go to war experience shell-shock from such horrifying trauma on a daily basis. And, even then, she doesn’t render the same trauma behaviors. The shock and dismay and nigh unseeable trauma they witness—some as young as 16—swiftly removes the scales from their eyes. They go from boys to men in a matter of months. Winn nailed the humanity of the men and their response to the inhumanity of repeated killing.
Winn’s prose is subversive, electrifying at turns. Some of the young soldiers are appointed to censor letters home, such as, “Mostly the men talk about the mud and the rats and God. We have to censor the mud and the rats, but God is allowed to remain…”
In a historical note following the novel’s last pages, the author shares all the books she read to assist on the legitimacy of the book’s war content, and she stated that she folded various ones into some of her characters, events, and put words in her characters’ mouths. She writes with acuity and alacrity, fueling the authority of the narrative with her assured insight. War was the antagonist, unabating, unrepentant, unrelenting. Brave characters permeated the pages with sharp credibility; you will accept that these prep school students laid down their Tennyson for trenches (but quoted him between sprays of bullets). In fact, the title is from Tennyson’s, In Memoriam A.H.H., and Winn’s fearlessness is evident, too. She commits to her characters courage and vulnerability, so that their dialogue and thoughts are genuine, and their behaviors emanate from what they had become, and they reflect what faced them.
Romantic scenes are eloquently quilled. Sex scenes are difficult enough to write between opposite genders (but at least there are centuries of examples to sift through). In the same-sex sex scenes here, Winn deftly roused the intimacy, made it do-or-die but nuanced, the consummate blend of verity and magic, devotion and candor and fire. Winn is classy, whether she is portraying love, lust, violence, or vulgarity.
My only complaint could seem rather sizable, but I’ll go ahead and try to say it lightly. The plot was both on the nose and over the top. The front line, the trenches—that was all organic and likely to engage any reader. The plot wasn’t as singular as the character-driven rewards, however. The melodramatic moments weren’t necessary, and they lessened the impact of the moment. Those parts reminded me of some of the old B&W movies from the 1940’s—perhaps it was intentional, to evince an old movie, but it didn’t work for me.
Winn also wrote a plot point that fit more in a Lifetime movie, not here. But she almost made it work, because her characters remained consistent; yes, her characterizations are fierce. But the performative parts of the plot—where they could almost break out in song (or sad song)—it distanced me when that happened. I think she was attempting to add gravitas, but she already had that. She could have just relied on her fully dimensional characters. I wanted to tell her that—that she didn’t need to amplify the plot like that, because her characterizations were just so phenomenal that it would have carried any dead weight in the plot.
OK, so I wasted two paragraphs on why I assigned 4 stars instead of 5. I’m still thrilled I read this book. Alice Winn is immensely talented, and she can do the hard parts effectively, but taking the plot down a notch would give the right pitch and poignancy. If you dislike war novels, you will not dislike In Memoriam. This isn’t a book about strategy and war language and missions. Winn has constancy in portraying her people, the cast of provocative, young individuals that grow up both in spite of the war and because of it.
The characterizations are A plus, palpably authentic. Her main characters, Sidney “Elly” Ellwood and Henry (Heinrich, half-German and half-British) Gaunt, meet at boarding school and fall in love, but aren’t confident enough to tell one another. Winn has a feisty and fulsome talent for meticulously depicting the people who populate the story. Even with a posh school of mostly rich white British teens, they are separate and distinct individuals. The ones who go to war experience shell-shock from such horrifying trauma on a daily basis. And, even then, she doesn’t render the same trauma behaviors. The shock and dismay and nigh unseeable trauma they witness—some as young as 16—swiftly removes the scales from their eyes. They go from boys to men in a matter of months. Winn nailed the humanity of the men and their response to the inhumanity of repeated killing.
Winn’s prose is subversive, electrifying at turns. Some of the young soldiers are appointed to censor letters home, such as, “Mostly the men talk about the mud and the rats and God. We have to censor the mud and the rats, but God is allowed to remain…”
In a historical note following the novel’s last pages, the author shares all the books she read to assist on the legitimacy of the book’s war content, and she stated that she folded various ones into some of her characters, events, and put words in her characters’ mouths. She writes with acuity and alacrity, fueling the authority of the narrative with her assured insight. War was the antagonist, unabating, unrepentant, unrelenting. Brave characters permeated the pages with sharp credibility; you will accept that these prep school students laid down their Tennyson for trenches (but quoted him between sprays of bullets). In fact, the title is from Tennyson’s, In Memoriam A.H.H., and Winn’s fearlessness is evident, too. She commits to her characters courage and vulnerability, so that their dialogue and thoughts are genuine, and their behaviors emanate from what they had become, and they reflect what faced them.
Romantic scenes are eloquently quilled. Sex scenes are difficult enough to write between opposite genders (but at least there are centuries of examples to sift through). In the same-sex sex scenes here, Winn deftly roused the intimacy, made it do-or-die but nuanced, the consummate blend of verity and magic, devotion and candor and fire. Winn is classy, whether she is portraying love, lust, violence, or vulgarity.
My only complaint could seem rather sizable, but I’ll go ahead and try to say it lightly. The plot was both on the nose and over the top. The front line, the trenches—that was all organic and likely to engage any reader. The plot wasn’t as singular as the character-driven rewards, however. The melodramatic moments weren’t necessary, and they lessened the impact of the moment. Those parts reminded me of some of the old B&W movies from the 1940’s—perhaps it was intentional, to evince an old movie, but it didn’t work for me.
Winn also wrote a plot point that fit more in a Lifetime movie, not here. But she almost made it work, because her characters remained consistent; yes, her characterizations are fierce. But the performative parts of the plot—where they could almost break out in song (or sad song)—it distanced me when that happened. I think she was attempting to add gravitas, but she already had that. She could have just relied on her fully dimensional characters. I wanted to tell her that—that she didn’t need to amplify the plot like that, because her characterizations were just so phenomenal that it would have carried any dead weight in the plot.
OK, so I wasted two paragraphs on why I assigned 4 stars instead of 5. I’m still thrilled I read this book. Alice Winn is immensely talented, and she can do the hard parts effectively, but taking the plot down a notch would give the right pitch and poignancy. If you dislike war novels, you will not dislike In Memoriam. This isn’t a book about strategy and war language and missions. Winn has constancy in portraying her people, the cast of provocative, young individuals that grow up both in spite of the war and because of it.
March 28, 2023
Had I not just read the far superior The New Life, to which it bears some superficial similarities, just prior to this, I might have rated this slightly higher. Although it is fast-paced and keeps one's interest, the prose never quite soars beyond the pedestrian, and most of the characters, other than the two leads, are fairly one-dimensional. Although the homophile angle makes this stand out, nothing else is really new here - as the author's afterwards makes clear in enumerating the numerous sources from which she cribbed.
She also mentions the book's film rights have been snapped up and it will be interesting to see if such ever actually gets made - amongst other problems is the fact that the characters age from 14 to 21, but I doubt Hollywood would cast it that young, which rather defeats the entire purpose.
She also mentions the book's film rights have been snapped up and it will be interesting to see if such ever actually gets made - amongst other problems is the fact that the characters age from 14 to 21, but I doubt Hollywood would cast it that young, which rather defeats the entire purpose.
May 21, 2024
Reread thoughts:
Utterly, heart-wrenchingly tragic; incredibly, intensely beautiful. I'm still hiccupping sobs and feeling fiercely obsessed and madly in love with In Memoriam.
I've never reread a book as quickly after my first read as I did In Memoriam. It's the best book I've ever read, hands down. Elly and Gaunt have my whole entire soul, and this book is an actual work of art.
I truly don't know how to put my feelings about it into words, but maybe one day I will.
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth." (Shakespeare. And Elly. And me about this book.)
"Withhold no atom’s atom or I die" (Keats)
____________________
Original review:
I'm utterly broken. Sobbed for the last hour of the audiobook, my face currently feels swollen.
Absolutely beautiful, intense, and tragic book that crushed me but ended on a slightly healing note. Incredible writing, gorgeous read, I'm devastated and in awe.
Full RTC when I've stopped crying, so in a few months or so
"What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
Utterly, heart-wrenchingly tragic; incredibly, intensely beautiful. I'm still hiccupping sobs and feeling fiercely obsessed and madly in love with In Memoriam.
I've never reread a book as quickly after my first read as I did In Memoriam. It's the best book I've ever read, hands down. Elly and Gaunt have my whole entire soul, and this book is an actual work of art.
I truly don't know how to put my feelings about it into words, but maybe one day I will.
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth." (Shakespeare. And Elly. And me about this book.)
"Withhold no atom’s atom or I die" (Keats)
____________________
Original review:
I'm utterly broken. Sobbed for the last hour of the audiobook, my face currently feels swollen.
Absolutely beautiful, intense, and tragic book that crushed me but ended on a slightly healing note. Incredible writing, gorgeous read, I'm devastated and in awe.
Full RTC when I've stopped crying, so in a few months or so
September 25, 2023
I don't have the words to express how much I loved In Memoriam by Alice Winn.
I was grabbed and spun into its web from the first page.
This is a novel about the incipient love and infatuation between two best friends, Gaunt, a half-German, and Ellwood, a beautiful, charming, poetry-obsessed young man, (they're really just boys). The two have been friends for years, boarding at a prestigious all-boys school. There's miscommunication or better said lack of direct communication, side-steps, glances, experimenting and a whole lot of "boys will be boys."
It's a feat in itself that Winn made me care for privileged boys at a posh school. I detest them in the twenty-first century, even Australia has those kinds of schools. But I digress ...
And then Austria declared war. The naive, underage boys, enrol to fight in the war. Gaunt goes first. He's ambivalent, will he have to fight against his German cousin? He's only eighteen. He's got no life experience, but given his privileged position in society he automatically becomes an officer, which comes with perks, and better pay, but he still has to fight, there's no hiding from the horrors of brutal fighting. Elwood and others will join soon.
Many letters are exchanged in this novel, between former schoolmates, between soldiers and their family members. Most are blase and don't really show the horrors of the war. The list of casualties grows, and an entire generation of young men is wiped out.
There is a large cast of characters peppering the pages of this novel. There's humour and banter, there are also vivid descriptions of the horrors of war. This novel fits a lot in its four hundred pages. I am far from a WWI connoisseur, but I appreciated Winn bringing to my attention the fact that even when it came to fighting against a common enemy, one's station in society still played a big role.
What was outstanding about this historical novel, from my perspective anyway, was that Winn didn't hit us over the head with the "big issues", it's all there for us to grasp, without leaning the balance one way or another.
Ultimately, this is a story about love. It's a formidable novel, an incredible debut. To say that I'm perplexed this didn't even make the Booker longlist - would be an understatement.
Do yourself a service - read In Memoriam.
I was grabbed and spun into its web from the first page.
This is a novel about the incipient love and infatuation between two best friends, Gaunt, a half-German, and Ellwood, a beautiful, charming, poetry-obsessed young man, (they're really just boys). The two have been friends for years, boarding at a prestigious all-boys school. There's miscommunication or better said lack of direct communication, side-steps, glances, experimenting and a whole lot of "boys will be boys."
It's a feat in itself that Winn made me care for privileged boys at a posh school. I detest them in the twenty-first century, even Australia has those kinds of schools. But I digress ...
And then Austria declared war. The naive, underage boys, enrol to fight in the war. Gaunt goes first. He's ambivalent, will he have to fight against his German cousin? He's only eighteen. He's got no life experience, but given his privileged position in society he automatically becomes an officer, which comes with perks, and better pay, but he still has to fight, there's no hiding from the horrors of brutal fighting. Elwood and others will join soon.
Many letters are exchanged in this novel, between former schoolmates, between soldiers and their family members. Most are blase and don't really show the horrors of the war. The list of casualties grows, and an entire generation of young men is wiped out.
There is a large cast of characters peppering the pages of this novel. There's humour and banter, there are also vivid descriptions of the horrors of war. This novel fits a lot in its four hundred pages. I am far from a WWI connoisseur, but I appreciated Winn bringing to my attention the fact that even when it came to fighting against a common enemy, one's station in society still played a big role.
What was outstanding about this historical novel, from my perspective anyway, was that Winn didn't hit us over the head with the "big issues", it's all there for us to grasp, without leaning the balance one way or another.
Ultimately, this is a story about love. It's a formidable novel, an incredible debut. To say that I'm perplexed this didn't even make the Booker longlist - would be an understatement.
Do yourself a service - read In Memoriam.
March 8, 2024
4.5 stars
This is a gut punch disguised as a novel. It's a story that burrows into your chest and refuses to be dislodged. Set against the backdrop of a shattered utopia – a boarding school ravaged by the First World War – Winn weaves a tale of forbidden love, shattering innocence, and the enduring scars of grief. For young men on the precipice of adulthood the idyllic halls of a boarding school become a stark contrast to the muddy trenches where innocence is a casualty as real as falling soldiers.
Alice Winn packs an emotional wallop. It dives into the horrors of World War I, but its heart lies in the forbidden love story between Henry and Sidney, two young men on the cusp of adulthood. Winn doesn't shy away from the brutality of war, but she also portrays the power of love and friendship to offer solace in the darkest times. The idyllic halls of their English boarding school shield Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood from the true cost of the war. News of fallen comrades stirs a romanticized sense of adventure, a stark contrast to the harrowing reality that awaits them on the Western Front.
The violence is portrayed with a brutal honesty that leaves a lasting impact. Winn paints a hauntingly vivid picture of the trenches. The idyllic school grounds are replaced by a landscape of mud, barbed wire, and the ever-present threat of death. Mud squelches underfoot, the metallic tang of blood fills the air, and the ground trembles under relentless shelling. Each loss feels like a personal blow, ripping another thread from the tapestry of our fragile connection with these characters.
This book explores themes of acceptance and friendship with tenderness, showcasing the bonds forged in the crucible of conflict. Their story is exhilarating and heartbreaking, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit even in the face of unimaginable hardship. The prose is both elegant and evocative. The emotional impact is relentless. We fall for Henry and Sidney, who are yearning for a connection that society at that time deems unacceptable. Their blossoming love, a fragile bud pushing through the cracked earth of war, is a beacon of hope in a world gone mad.
This book is a lament for lost innocence, a fierce exploration of societal constraints that strangle love, and a testament to the resilience of the spirit even as it's being broken. It's a story that will have you weeping with rage at the senselessness of war, and sobbing with a mixture of grief and admiration for the characters' unwavering love. It's a raw exploration of the human condition.
It's a story that will leave you breathless, heartbroken, and ultimately, strangely hopeful. It reminds us that even in the darkest of times, love, acceptance, and the bonds of friendship can offer a flickering ember of light to guide us through the storm. Prepare to be wrecked, but also prepare to be profoundly moved.
This is a gut punch disguised as a novel. It's a story that burrows into your chest and refuses to be dislodged. Set against the backdrop of a shattered utopia – a boarding school ravaged by the First World War – Winn weaves a tale of forbidden love, shattering innocence, and the enduring scars of grief. For young men on the precipice of adulthood the idyllic halls of a boarding school become a stark contrast to the muddy trenches where innocence is a casualty as real as falling soldiers.
Alice Winn packs an emotional wallop. It dives into the horrors of World War I, but its heart lies in the forbidden love story between Henry and Sidney, two young men on the cusp of adulthood. Winn doesn't shy away from the brutality of war, but she also portrays the power of love and friendship to offer solace in the darkest times. The idyllic halls of their English boarding school shield Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood from the true cost of the war. News of fallen comrades stirs a romanticized sense of adventure, a stark contrast to the harrowing reality that awaits them on the Western Front.
The violence is portrayed with a brutal honesty that leaves a lasting impact. Winn paints a hauntingly vivid picture of the trenches. The idyllic school grounds are replaced by a landscape of mud, barbed wire, and the ever-present threat of death. Mud squelches underfoot, the metallic tang of blood fills the air, and the ground trembles under relentless shelling. Each loss feels like a personal blow, ripping another thread from the tapestry of our fragile connection with these characters.
This book explores themes of acceptance and friendship with tenderness, showcasing the bonds forged in the crucible of conflict. Their story is exhilarating and heartbreaking, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit even in the face of unimaginable hardship. The prose is both elegant and evocative. The emotional impact is relentless. We fall for Henry and Sidney, who are yearning for a connection that society at that time deems unacceptable. Their blossoming love, a fragile bud pushing through the cracked earth of war, is a beacon of hope in a world gone mad.
This book is a lament for lost innocence, a fierce exploration of societal constraints that strangle love, and a testament to the resilience of the spirit even as it's being broken. It's a story that will have you weeping with rage at the senselessness of war, and sobbing with a mixture of grief and admiration for the characters' unwavering love. It's a raw exploration of the human condition.
It's a story that will leave you breathless, heartbroken, and ultimately, strangely hopeful. It reminds us that even in the darkest of times, love, acceptance, and the bonds of friendship can offer a flickering ember of light to guide us through the storm. Prepare to be wrecked, but also prepare to be profoundly moved.
April 2, 2023
This quickly went from “I’m not sure this is for me or that I’m into this writing style” to being my top book of the year so far.
This story was devastating yet beautiful. It was quite graphic. It blows my mind what actual children are subjected to in war time. To experience such brutality and to come of age at the same time and during a time where your love is not legal is just unfathomable. Though so much of this was difficult to read I didn’t want it to end.
This story was devastating yet beautiful. It was quite graphic. It blows my mind what actual children are subjected to in war time. To experience such brutality and to come of age at the same time and during a time where your love is not legal is just unfathomable. Though so much of this was difficult to read I didn’t want it to end.
June 27, 2023
This is a love story like Song of Achilles, but also a war story with many young deaths. There are vivid descriptions of the WWI battlefields: “No-Man’s Land”; muddy/bloody trenches with rats and lice; gas-attacks destroying lungs and skin, “Over the Top” and getting mowed down by machine guns. You’ll be changed per the shell-shock like all the characters were.
The key boys all come from privileged families and attend a boarding school. The brutality of the students to one another at school is something I’ve seen/read in other British stories. (Rolling the under-classmates down a hill in a barrel, locking them in closets, etc). But they see it as tradition and talk nostalgically about it.
(Sidney/Elly) Ellwood and (Henry/Heinrich) Gaunt are the two main characters. Some fooling around between boys is shrugged at when you are at an all-boys school. It is assumed you will settle down with wife/kids/job once your education is completed. But for some, this love for boys will not fade. Ellwood is constantly quoting/thinking poetry, in the iambic pentameter of the romantic Tennyson. Whereas:
It was Classics Gaunt wanted: Plutarch and Xenophon and Thucydides, men who proved that Gaunt’s own troubles were ancient and survivable. They were clear-eyed, the Greeks. They did not dress up the world with romance and chivalry, did not lure poetry-hearted fools into evil.
There is camaraderie and love stumbling all over each other at school and then in the trenches. The boys keep openly hiding their feelings. Only Ellwood is willing to express himself through his cryptic romantic poetry.
Ellwood wanted to punch him (Gaunt). He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.
The character development is strong, as the boys truly start out as “boys” of privilege in at Preshute (English boarding school), where typical teens form and re-form their social groups. The early war had 19 as the required age to enlist, but the need for soldiers was strong, so the British women/girls would give a white feather (coward) to anyone that looked remotely old enough to fight, thus forcing younger boys off to enlist. The age became 18 as the war progressed. Their deaths and wounds are reported in the school’s paper, The Preshutian.
The PTSD/shell-shock is devastating to the soldiers and their families alike. Whole brotherhoods in a family are lost. But it is for King and Country. There was great honor dying in battle. The letters home always said “He died quickly amongst friends”, whereas we read of painful agonizing deaths in a large variety of ways (bayonet, shot through throat, blown up by grenade, shot for not “going over the top”, losing limbs, being gassed and coughing up lung). There is some serious Shell-shock for the reader here too.
I’ve read many WWII books, with huge battles and casualties. But they tend to be statistics. In this book, you get to know each of the boys that die. Even if it just very small details, you feel a connection and a strong sense of loss when you read about their death. A bit of a trigger warning.
The story has a methodical plot that I found well executed with a satisfying ending that reminds me a bit of “Maurice”. Happy; Sad; Hopeful; Anything is possible.
The title, “In Memoriam” stems from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson Poem: “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” We all tend to know Tennyson from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
This was written in 1854.
But Tennyson’s masterpiece is “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”
In Memoriam A. H. H. (100 pages, taking 17 years to write) Since this is referenced early in this book (and obviously in the title), I looked through some poetry collections I have at home for Tennyson. I found:
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost by Harold Bloom
I am SO glad I have this book.
The author has a brief bio on each poet.
Tennyson: 1809-1892 [brief bio excerpts below]
"The most accomplished artist of all English poets since Milton and Pope."
"between 1830 and 1842, the crucial events of Tennyson's life occurred. His father died in 1831, and subsequently the poet left Cambridge without taking his degree. On September 15, 1833, Arthur Hallam died suddenly at twenty-two, in Vienna, of a brain seizure. Tennyson had met Emily Sellwood and reached an understanding with her as early as 1830; they became engaged in 1838, but did not marry until 1850. Biographers explain this twenty-year delay as financial in nature, but that seems mildly preposterous."
"Looking back, his life had one event only, and that was the death of Hallam. Most of his best poetry, quite aside from In Memoriam, is elegiac, and the subject of the sense of loss is always Hallam. "Ulysses," "Thihonus," "Morte d'Arthur," "Tears, Idle Tears," much of "Idyllis of the King", the late "Merlin and the Gleam," all mourn Hallam (sometimes obliquely), just as the living Hallam directly inspired the best poems of the 1830 and 1832 volumes. This matter hardly can be overemphasized in considering Tennyson's poetry. He became the perfect model of a poet who is a bereaved lover, and the largest clue we can have as to the meaning of his poetry is in its relationship to Hallam. Hallam represented Romanticism to Tennyson, and the later Tennyson would have been more of a High Romantic and less of a societal spokesman if Hallam had lived."
Here is a sample of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”:
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, then there
I find him worthier to be loved.
And more…
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Solid 5 for me. The character-casualties/deaths made this book hit hard. The reality of 1914-1918 expression of love during war was well depicted with all the internal and external complexities.
The key boys all come from privileged families and attend a boarding school. The brutality of the students to one another at school is something I’ve seen/read in other British stories. (Rolling the under-classmates down a hill in a barrel, locking them in closets, etc). But they see it as tradition and talk nostalgically about it.
(Sidney/Elly) Ellwood and (Henry/Heinrich) Gaunt are the two main characters. Some fooling around between boys is shrugged at when you are at an all-boys school. It is assumed you will settle down with wife/kids/job once your education is completed. But for some, this love for boys will not fade. Ellwood is constantly quoting/thinking poetry, in the iambic pentameter of the romantic Tennyson. Whereas:
It was Classics Gaunt wanted: Plutarch and Xenophon and Thucydides, men who proved that Gaunt’s own troubles were ancient and survivable. They were clear-eyed, the Greeks. They did not dress up the world with romance and chivalry, did not lure poetry-hearted fools into evil.
There is camaraderie and love stumbling all over each other at school and then in the trenches. The boys keep openly hiding their feelings. Only Ellwood is willing to express himself through his cryptic romantic poetry.
Ellwood wanted to punch him (Gaunt). He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.
The character development is strong, as the boys truly start out as “boys” of privilege in at Preshute (English boarding school), where typical teens form and re-form their social groups. The early war had 19 as the required age to enlist, but the need for soldiers was strong, so the British women/girls would give a white feather (coward) to anyone that looked remotely old enough to fight, thus forcing younger boys off to enlist. The age became 18 as the war progressed. Their deaths and wounds are reported in the school’s paper, The Preshutian.
The PTSD/shell-shock is devastating to the soldiers and their families alike. Whole brotherhoods in a family are lost. But it is for King and Country. There was great honor dying in battle. The letters home always said “He died quickly amongst friends”, whereas we read of painful agonizing deaths in a large variety of ways (bayonet, shot through throat, blown up by grenade, shot for not “going over the top”, losing limbs, being gassed and coughing up lung). There is some serious Shell-shock for the reader here too.
I’ve read many WWII books, with huge battles and casualties. But they tend to be statistics. In this book, you get to know each of the boys that die. Even if it just very small details, you feel a connection and a strong sense of loss when you read about their death. A bit of a trigger warning.
The story has a methodical plot that I found well executed with a satisfying ending that reminds me a bit of “Maurice”. Happy; Sad; Hopeful; Anything is possible.
The title, “In Memoriam” stems from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson Poem: “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” We all tend to know Tennyson from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
This was written in 1854.
But Tennyson’s masterpiece is “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”
In Memoriam A. H. H. (100 pages, taking 17 years to write) Since this is referenced early in this book (and obviously in the title), I looked through some poetry collections I have at home for Tennyson. I found:
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost by Harold Bloom
I am SO glad I have this book.
The author has a brief bio on each poet.
Tennyson: 1809-1892 [brief bio excerpts below]
"The most accomplished artist of all English poets since Milton and Pope."
"between 1830 and 1842, the crucial events of Tennyson's life occurred. His father died in 1831, and subsequently the poet left Cambridge without taking his degree. On September 15, 1833, Arthur Hallam died suddenly at twenty-two, in Vienna, of a brain seizure. Tennyson had met Emily Sellwood and reached an understanding with her as early as 1830; they became engaged in 1838, but did not marry until 1850. Biographers explain this twenty-year delay as financial in nature, but that seems mildly preposterous."
"Looking back, his life had one event only, and that was the death of Hallam. Most of his best poetry, quite aside from In Memoriam, is elegiac, and the subject of the sense of loss is always Hallam. "Ulysses," "Thihonus," "Morte d'Arthur," "Tears, Idle Tears," much of "Idyllis of the King", the late "Merlin and the Gleam," all mourn Hallam (sometimes obliquely), just as the living Hallam directly inspired the best poems of the 1830 and 1832 volumes. This matter hardly can be overemphasized in considering Tennyson's poetry. He became the perfect model of a poet who is a bereaved lover, and the largest clue we can have as to the meaning of his poetry is in its relationship to Hallam. Hallam represented Romanticism to Tennyson, and the later Tennyson would have been more of a High Romantic and less of a societal spokesman if Hallam had lived."
Here is a sample of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”:
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, then there
I find him worthier to be loved.
And more…
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Solid 5 for me. The character-casualties/deaths made this book hit hard. The reality of 1914-1918 expression of love during war was well depicted with all the internal and external complexities.
May 1, 2023
I wanted to like this, yet the characters were hopelessly two-dimensional, the writing syrupy and full of cliches, and the plot predictable. The author’s skill simply did not live up to their ambition. Some parts of the book were better crafted than others, but the novel as a whole left me disappointed. The author’s idea of conveying the horrors of war by throwing as many descriptions of charred and dismembered bodies as possible at the reader stands as a testament to their creative limitations. This works, I suppose, as your average romance novel, but sadly fails as anything more than that. Oh, and cringeworthy sentimentality permeating every paragraph did not help one bit.
March 18, 2024
Dead Poet’s Society + A Little Life + Cornelia Street by Taylor Swift + WWI?
August 26, 2022
'We won't lose,' he said finally. 'We're the greatest empire there's ever been.'
In lots of ways this is a told-before story for anyone familiar with the literature of WW1 in fiction, memoir and history - so it's to Winn's credit that she imbues the whole thing with an aura of freshness, reminding us, all over again, of those bullet points: the fatal Edwardian mix of empire, public school superiority, and masculinity that still believed in dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; the early twentieth century 'love that dare not say its name'; and the sheer dogged brutality of the conflict, especially the trench warfare of the western front. Add to that a Susan Hill-esque Strange Meeting vibe of covert love and desire, and plenty of men writing war poetry before having to deal with life-changing wounds and we're in familiar Pat Barker territory, with even a bit of tunnelling that is reminiscent of, though functionally different from, Birdsong.
However, despite all the usual suspects turning up, this still stands up as a creditable and credible story in its own right, and I think that's because we believe in and are made to deeply care about the central characters, Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, and it's their relationship which gives heart to the book. It is a little convenient that Ellwood has a Jewish mother and Gaunt a German one in order to wring some particular pathos from their situation, but it's not generally over-played.
My slight qualm is that there's a section of the book from about 50% that veers towards the melodramatic .
Despite this rather manipulated pathos, this is both tender and horrific with a gorgeous, unsentimental love story at its heart.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
December 23, 2023
I already filmed my best books of the year video but just know this should be in it. this is history. this is a debut novel and its more thoughtful, more well written and more inspired than what most seasoned authors are writing.
April 19, 2024
“What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
me:
my heart will never mend ^_^ oh sidney and henry, there is a world for you. (head in hands)
May 29, 2023
quite possibly the most tender and horrific book I have ever read.
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