The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society...
Our second May book (yes, I know, it’s now July but…) has been living in the shadows of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for a bit too long, as Ann very politely reminded me today.
This is a quiet book, nearly exactly the opposite of the Stieg Larsson blockbusters. It is what we were taught in English Lit 101 was called an “epistolary novel,” meaning the story is told entirely through an exchange of letters. In theory and in general, people don’t cotton much to this format. Letters sound kind of boring and indeed I can’t imagine just how boring they might sound to people who are under 30 and rely entirely on email or tweets for their primary person-to-person communication!
In this particularly charming novel of letters set in 1946, the main character, Juliet, finds herself bored with writing successful upbeat columns about the small pleasures of living through the war in Britain and looks around for another challenge. She finds it accidentally when a book she had once owned and (presumably) donated or sold to a used book store eventually finds its way to Guernsey, a small British island that is actually closer to France than to the UK mainland. Guernsey is geographically isolated from Britain and is even more cut off after the German army invades it and occupies it throughout WWII. For the most part (with a few notable exceptions), the occupying German forces treat the residents of the island harshly and corral most of the island’s resources for their own needs. Among many other deprivations, food is severely rationed and a curfew is imposed on all island residents. Along with nearly everything else, books are in very short supply.
A small group of friends secretly plans a meal with food hidden from the Nazis and, losing track of time, begin to return to their homes after curfew. They are apprehended by German soldiers and in an effort to justify their curfew violation, one of their more creative members explains (falsely) that they belong to an innocent-sounding literary society and had lost track of time due to their stimulating conversation about books. Then, to make their story look true, they decide to continue the charade, although few of them have any real interest in reading. Over the course of the novel, the group becomes a kind of family; books are sought out, read and discussed; and they all begin to correspond with Juliet. Initially, they contact her because she lives in London and they are hopeful that she can track down books they’d like to read. Eventually, she decides their story might be a good kick-off point for her own next book and asks each of the Society’s members to write her about their literary interests and how they each fit into the overall human geography of the island.
This general outline doesn’t really give any idea why this was such an engrossing book. It charms because of the distinct personalities of the Guernsey readers; the affect the German occupation has on such an isolated, hardscrabble society; and because of the way the pseudo literary society bands together to take care of a 4-year child left behind when her mother is abruptly arrested by the occupying army and sent off to an internment camp. The stories merge when Juliet arrives in Guernsey to get more direct information for her proposed book. For a novel about the hardships of war, there is an underlying sunny-ness and camaraderie that is almost irresistible. The characters are lovable for the most part, but not all of them are painted as being equally easy to love. There are characters that are so eccentric or so bitter that it takes work to see their good points but the writer(s) take the time to create round enough personalities that we begin to like even the most difficult ones. And, from a purely historical standpoint, the book covers an extremely little-known aspect of WWII, humanizes it, and makes it come to life.
As an aside, after I read this book (fortunately, for the sake of the May’s books, the P-Town book group read it last year), I read another one recommended to me by my sister-in-law Beth, which was an interesting complement to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay. It’s about a similarly little-known WWII incident, the round-up by the French police after the Germans invaded and occupied France, of 10,000 Jews. The French police were not acting on orders from the Nazis but in anticipation of maybe being asked to do so at some later point. Nearly all 10,000 were initially held in deplorable conditions in a stadium in Paris, the Val d’Hiver, and then sent by train to Auschwitz, where almost all of them died. The most horrifying aspect of this incident was that men were rounded up first, then women and children at a later date. Once the women and children were collected and imprisoned in the stadium for a few days, the women were separated from the children and sent on ahead to a Nazi work camp. The children (from babies to pre-teens) were left alone in the stadium and ultimately sent to a different part of Auschwitz, where, without any maternal care, most died almost immediately. I certainly won’t paint this as an uplifting book, but if you’re interested in learning more about another little-known Nazi atrocity, and you’ve already read The Diary of Anne Frank often enough, Sarah’s Key is another gripping story that was very hard to put down.
Signing off, your despotic-rulers’ literary correspondent,
Susan
