Helen Dunmore (1993) Zennor in Darkness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zennor_in_Darkness

Helen Dunmore (1993) Zennor in Darkness won the 1994 McKitterick Prize which is awarded for debut novels for writers over 40. Dunmore is a great example of why poets often make the best prose writers.

Her protagonists are brought alive by her attention to detail. Big historical events such as the First World War in 1917 are being fought somewhere else but also in the heart. Dunmore captures girls’ beating hearts first, who they love and why. Her novels are structured around that truth.

It begins with three girls flinging themselves off a sand dune and stripping off most of their clothing to wade and swim in the sea. Cousins Peggy, Clare and Hannah.

Peggy and Hannah are part of Zennor. Their families have been their generations and it’s in the way they look and speak. Their family are in trade and own a draper shop.

Clare Coyne is the beautiful outsider. Her father gentry from far-off London and is also a Catholic. Her mother died in childbirth, which recurs in most of Dunmore’s novels. He is an amateur botanist and hopes to write a book. He brings up Clare to be independent and she illustrates his book. She is an artist.

The war is not going well. Oxford, Cambridge and most of the public schools have been emptied of boys, an officer class that had been fed into the war machine. Too often the boy delivering telegrams walks up and down Zennor’s streets delivering the coup de grace. There will be no homecoming. Endless lists of missing and presumed dead in the newspapers are peered at and studied.

John William’s homecoming seems like a minor miracle. Hannah’s brother, and Clare’s cousin, is to be made an officer. He has 48 hours at home. He was the boy that was always a bit different. A bit better than his peers. He had aspirations to become a doctor, which among others would seem fanciful. But this is not the same John William’s that was drafted and went willingly into the army. He refuses to shut his eyes and sleep or to talk much about what it’s like over there. For how can he explain the inexplicable where even his own body denies it?

Love.

We’re in D.H.Lawrence territory here. But this is not the famous writer, but a failed writer, whose book has been banned for the muck it contained. He has writer’s block. And has rented a cottage for £5 per year and grows vegetables to help become self-sufficient. His dreams of an artist colony defunct. Far from London, but he is not forgotten. He refused to fight and cannot be conscripted because of his poor health. He speaks out and writes polemics against the international calamity that is the World War.

 Gossip. His wife is not his wife, but another man’s wife. Frieda is German. She is more suspect than he and is spied upon and her curtains and the colours and the way they are closed are meant to act as signals for passing U-boats.

Dunmore often pairs well-known figures with unknown woman. In this case Clare.

Clare’s love for her cousin, John Williams is a small thing but it is everything to her, with the usual consequences. Another Dunmore trait.

Dunmore’s point of view shifts are all of the above characters. Beautifully done, of course. In her later novels she is not so promiscuous. Her main character’s point of view may switch but will not extend to such plurality. Read on.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6