Rating: 5/5
Review:
Engrossing, readable and quietly brilliant
I thought this was an excellent book. I enjoyed Clare Morall's The Roundabout Man very much, but this is if anything even better. It is exceptionally well written, gripping, thoughtful and very wise.
The story is set around a girls' school in Exeter in 1942 and 1963. The two narratives are intercut, and Morall uses the device very well. The 1942 story is of an air-raid on Exeter and the school itself and the immediate aftermath, and in 1963 a new head arrives at the school and we meet again some of the characters from 1942 and learn about what has happened to others. The book is concerned with character, how events shape us and how different lives develop. It doesn't sound like much of a plot, but I found it completely engrossing and just as gripping as a tense thriller a lot of the time.
Clare Morrall writes very well. She has a very readable style and a deceptively calm tone with very few similes or metaphors, but conjures exceptionally vivid and convincing scenes and characters. The experience of being in the air raid which opens the book is brilliantly evoked, for example, and there are equally evocative scenes throughout. Morall is also brilliant at getting inside people's heads and hearts and painting fascinating and completely convincing portraits of her characters. She captures the complexities of people very well: their good intentions, their self-deceptions and insensitivities and also their kindnesses, endearing quirks and quiet nobilities. She has a quiet but deep understanding of what makes people tick, and her characters and her explorations of loss and its effects really speak to me as a result.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it involving, readable, humane and very rewarding, and I recommend it very warmly.
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