We hadn't read anything by this prolific and award winning (Schindler's Ark) writer, so I didn't know what to expect.
An extraordinary book in many ways, the story of two sisters (Sally and Naomi) nursing experiences in WW1. A choice for our book club and I have never made so many notes. I much preferred the human stories rather than the descriptions of the nurses attending the wounded or going on expeditions during rest days. There is so much extraneous detail which does nothing for the pace of the story. There are times when the plot seems very contrived, at one time we follow Sally from periods on the ward, to triage, to operating theatre to make sure we see everything. Every facet of war is covered whether relevant to the story or not.
Many of the characters are very well drawn, the nurses, Matron Mitchie and the doctors at Chateaux Biancthun come to mind.
Sometimes the prose is quite unusual: "He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul" and later "Sally, who was staring out of the window with the suspicion that the world would look different through the glass of this magnificent mechanism".
Sometimes the prose is quite unusual: "He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul" and later "Sally, who was staring out of the window with the suspicion that the world would look different through the glass of this magnificent mechanism".
We learnt a lot about what happened behind the front, about hospital ships, the dedication of the nurses and the hardship of providing primary care.
I had thought about giving up a third of the way through this sometimes tedious novel. But I'm glad I stuck with it as the second half in France is far better. This would have made a perfectly good book on it's own if it had cut out the last 100 pages. With a forceful editor cutting over 500 crowded pages by half to a less packed 300, there was a five star book crying to get out.
I had thought about giving up a third of the way through this sometimes tedious novel. But I'm glad I stuck with it as the second half in France is far better. This would have made a perfectly good book on it's own if it had cut out the last 100 pages. With a forceful editor cutting over 500 crowded pages by half to a less packed 300, there was a five star book crying to get out.
And why no quotation marks? This is a writer who deliberately provokes for no reason. None of us liked the ending, a farcical conclusion to a frustrating novel.
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