Rating...5⭐
You can buy "In Memoriam"...Here You can find out more about Alice Winn...Here 380 pages
In 1914, war feels far away to Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. They're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that his best friend is in love with him, always has been.
When Gaunt's mother asks him to enlist in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, he signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings. But Ellwood and their classmates soon follow him into the horrors of the trenches. Though Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, their friends are dying in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.
Written by Alice Winn as her “breakout” novel. Winner of the 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize and 2023 Waterstones novel of the year. Both very well deserved IMO!
Alice Winn has also done an evident amount of research into the time period and WW1 itself and started writing In Memoriam after reading school newspapers from this time.
This book is written in a way that really pulls through a lot of emotions. I read it in a week (new baby slowing me down) as I couldn’t put it down. It covers topics such as homosexuality in a time that it was illegal to act on those feelings, set in a boarding school and a war too horrific to imagine. Thankfully, nothing that I can personally relate to. And yet… it was able to evoke genuine wide ranging emotion. One scene set at the battle of the Somme (that shouldn’t be a spoiler, it’s pretty well documented) made me genuinely stressed, feel anger, confusion and bewilderment. I’ve not connected to description like it before (I’m normally all for the conversational writing). Despite its deep and heavy topics, it also brings through comradery and a unique sense of understanding amongst peers both at the school and at the front. The bond between the boys/men prisoner of war camps and the change in men following their time at the front are also captured and conveyed with an almost ugly beauty.
One of the novels strengths is the way Winn brings across emotions. There is a point where Ellwood is walking through town while on leave in England and is handed a white feather. The way it’s written and his decision to never walk in civvi clothes again is particularly well done. Also the scene with the Battle of the Somme (I know I mentioned it above but it’s unbelievably good writing) covered so many different emotions in that one moment. Her use of multiple characters perspective and the perspective of the opposition made the picture really full and left me with genuine feels of anticipation and impending dread. She was able to hold me in this space for, what felt like, an uncomfortably long time… needless to say, I took a break at the end of that chapter.
The book is written primarily from the perspective of both the main characters, Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt. Both of these characters are very contrasting and have different views of many things, including the war. Gaunt is partly German and Ellwood has a fantastical schoolboy view of glory. By doing this, Winn is not only able to cover several aspects and introduce more characters and relationships, but also able to draw parallels between expectations and reality. For example, the meaning taken in some of the letters from Gaunt to Ellwood from the front is missed until Ellwood is able to experience these things himself, “When Gaunt wrote that they were rotting, Ellwood had not understood - how could sand rot? But the bags weren’t filled with sand anymore…”. It also allows Winn to draw parallels between the impact the war has on such contrasting characters.
One minor distraction form me was that throughout the book Ellwood draws on poetry and quotes this out loud, often based on situations that he is in. While this is very cleverly done and is a good way for him to articulate his feelings while remaining (somewhat) subtle, I myself found it difficult to connect at times. I have very limited prior experience with poetry and therefore some of it could be lost on me but I did find some nks tenuous. Still think it’s very clever though!
It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.
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Alice Winn is the author of In Memoriam. She grew up in Paris and was educated in the UK. She has a degree in English literature from Oxford University. She lives in Brooklyn.
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