Love and Loss on the Western Front

Sometimes a novel will grab its reader and not let them go. Alice Winn's In Memoriam (2023) gripped me tightly and I could not stop reading. When I was away from the novel I kept thinking about the characters and wondering how they were faring. And now that I am done, I am saddened that I will never get to read it again for the first time.

Two teenage boys attend an elite English boarding school, Preshute. It is 1914 and their school newsletter, The Preshutian, publishes lists of their colleagues and alumni who have been killed or injured in war. On the streets young women hand out white feathers to men of fighting age to shame them in to enlisting. Prefect Sidney Ellwood is obsessed with poetry, Tennyson in particular. His best friend Henry Gaunt is a scholar of Ancient Greek. The two are in love with one another, but cannot admit their feelings even to themselves. Despite his youth, Gaunt enlists in the Royal Kennet Fusiliers and is off to France. It does not take long for Ellwood to join him. Here at the front they are able to act on their feelings, even if they cannot express themselves in words, knowing that what happens here cannot continue when they return home. The sense that any day can be their last makes their love more urgent. 

At Ypres, Loos and Somme, the battle rages. The boys are separated and become shadows of themselves through the trauma they endured. All the soldiers and officers experience such loss, injured physically and mentally, forever scarred. 

At its heart, this is a queer love story. The novel presents a realistic portrait of forbidden romance at a time when homosexuality was illegal. There is such tenderness and beauty in the way this relationship is portrayed. Beyond this is a heartbreaking tale of war, when so many young lives were lost. Winn does not shy away from the brutalities of battle - the barbed wire, the gas, the trench warfare. She also showcases the way social class was observed at the front, where merit did not determine rank. Despite the darkness, there is much humour and lightness. The interactions between all the men, and the harebrained schemes of POWs attempting escape, provide a counter balance to the war. 

What makes the novel so good is Alice Winn's writing. She has a beautiful, thoughtful way of crafting sentences and pacing the story. Her ability to create realistic characters who are transformed by war shows a maturity that makes one forget that this is her debut novel.

In Memoriam is so good. It is like a perfectly written combination of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Timothy Findley's The Wars, and Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong.  This is definitely a contender for my favourite book of the year.