Resistance by Owen Sheers

You can buy "Resistance"...Here

You can follow Owen Sheers...Here

• The Blurb...

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied . . . Young farmer's wife Sarah Lewis wakes to find her husband has disappeared, along with all of the men from her remote Welsh village. A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol's commanding officer, Albrecht, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of his mission - to claim an extraordinary medieval art treasure that lies hidden in the valley. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.

• My Review...

I decided to review this book for several reasons. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia had just occurred and as such the book was topical. I am familiar with the Black Mountains which are my favourite place in the world and Owen Sheers is a high profile presence in the Welsh literal world. (as can be seen on his website in the link in the preceding section)

This book is set in an alternate history of Germany winning World War 2 and invading the UK. In a small, isolated valley in Wales, the farmers wives wake up to find all their husbands gone, presumably to join the Resistance. The women are at first dumbfounded, but soon realise that they have to carry the several farms work as nature waits for no-one. They expect and hope that the war will pass them by. There would be no need for the enemy to occupy their rural backwater. But come they do, in the form of a small hand picked patrol on a secret mission, led by English speaking, Oxford educated Albrecht.

Albrecht leads his men to the valley and they are quickly snowed in. He faces a dilemma. He knows the farmers have left to join the Resistance, so he should have the wives shot for aiding the insurgency but he is tired of war, and the rest of the German war machine neither know nor care where his patrol is. If he finishes his mission, his men will be drawn back into the meat grinder of the battle for London. They come to compromise and now the real Resistance begins. The wives must resist the creeping comfort of the invaders, who gradually supplant their missing menfolk. They become ever more closely entwined as the women count on the soldiers for the physical demands of farming. Both the women and the cut off patrol lose all sense of context with the war and the world in general. It becomes harder to keep their sense of whose side they are on. Both sides operate in this vacuum and it becomes ever more difficult to resist settling into the idyllic pastoral life and ignoring the real world forever.

I have read a few alternate history, Germany invading UK books in the past but this one is very different. There is a small amount of action but this book is full of the subtle, nuanced emotions of resistance and acquiescence that may be misconstrued as collaboration. I think it's a more true to life telling of how an invasion would play out in a rural area that was never really connected to it's own country in the first place.

I originally thought that I would have liked the author to give it a bit more blockbuster welly. In some sense I found this book frustrating. There isn't a great deal of action. It isn't a WW2  testosterone fuelled adventure. In addition there are a lot of tangents left unfulfilled, especially around the escaped husbands. Also the ending is open to interpretation, which is a thing that often annoys me. With these factors in mind I was  going to give it a 3* star. I had fallen into the trap of being more interested in the destination rather than the journey. 

However, in the days since I finished the book, it has been stuck in my head like a bee in a jam jar. This is always a good sign in a book. What we have is an intelligently, nuanced narrative that operates in the vast moral desert set between the imposing mountains of right and wrong. What is morally acceptable and what feels right are often not the same thing. At the risk of sounding a little sexist, this is a book about war that women can enjoy as much, if not more than men. While some strands of the plot may have disappeared into the ether the author does possess a lyrical turn of phrase that befits the most famous living poet in the land of bards. Some phrases just drip off the tongue like chocolate honey. The author also provides an afterword about his encounter with a local man in his youth who was recruited by the UK Government for resistance work during WW2. Fascinating stuff. All round It was a thought provoking read. So I bumped it up to a 4*. A slow burner that gets to you in the end.

• Selected Quotes...

"The tail of the marching infantry was passing behind him. The slow ones. The blistered ones. The broken souls with broken soles."

"He read the order twice. The typewriter ribbon needed replacing. The letters were chipped and bitten, every ‘r’ faded, ghosts among crowds of the living."

"There was something about the severity of its slopes, as if a cleaver had b"een driven into the soil and wrenched out with no movement from side to side."

"As ever, her speech was sparse, but Albrecht had come to understand that for every word spoken there were another ten shadowing it, unsaid within her. The words she did speak were like stones dropped into a well to determine its depth. Few, but resonant beyond their own sound."

"He’d intervened in nature, hiding the bruised and bitten rodent in the garden hedge. But he’d known it was only temporary. That he was only keeping at bay, just for a moment, what he knew all too well to be inevitable. The cat would find the mouse, the wolf will find the lamb and the war, like the river they walked beside now, would always rediscover its course, however much he wished to dam it with the insignificant pebbles of his own intentions."

• If You Liked This, Then You May Like...

Fatherland by Robert Harris

SS GB by Len Deighton

The Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgins

* While the above books share the alternate history of Germany winning WW2  they differ in style from  Resistance. Fatherland is a criminal investigation piece, SSGB is a political thriller and The Eagle Has Landed is an out and out war adventure book. Sadly I could not think of an alternate history book that is as subtle and quietly emotional as Resistance.

• About The Author...

Owen Sheers is an author, poet and playwright. He has published two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and has recently been announced as the 2018 recipient of the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries, a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. Owen’s first novel, Resistance has been translated into eleven languages. Owen co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, released in the UK in 2011. In 2009 he published the novella White Ravens, a contemporary response to the myth of Branwen Daughter of Llyr, as part of Seren’s ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion’ series. His most recent novel, I Saw A Man, was published in June 2015, and was short-listed for the Prix Etranger in France.

Owen’s theatrical writing includes the script and novelisation (The Gospel of Us) for National Theatre of Wales’ 72 hour site-specific production in Port Talbot, The Passion, a play created with wounded service personnel, The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which toured the UK and Canada and won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, and NTW’s Mametz. His verse drama Pink Mist, commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and published by Faber in June 2013, won the Hay Festival Poetry Medal and the Wales Book of the Year 2014 and was produced for the stage by Bristol Old Vic. His BBC film-poem to mark the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, The Green Hollow, won three BAFTA Cymru awards and was nominated for BAFTA and Grierson awards. The book of the film has recently been published by Faber.

Owen has collaborated with composers on two oratorios. The Water Diviner’s Tale was created with Rachel Portman and performed at the BBC Proms in 2007, while A Violence of Gifts, inspired by a period of research at CERN, was created with Mark Bowden and premiered at St David’s Hall in April 2015. Owen is currently developing an original opera with Mark for the Welsh National Opera.

In 2012 Owen was Artist in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. His resulting non-fiction work on the Welsh team, Calon was published by Faber in February 2013.

Owen also presents arts and literature programmes for TV and Radio. In 2009 he wrote and presented A Poet’s Guide to Britain, a 6 part series for BBC 4 about poetry and landscape. The accompanying anthology is published by Penguin. His other documentaries include one-hour studies of the poets Dylan Thomas and Keith Douglas. His professional positions have included being Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and a 2007/8 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He is currently Professor in Creativity at Swansea University and a trustee and co-founder of the Black Mountains College project.

(From owensheers.co.uk)