BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: In Memoriam (Alice Winn, author)
World War I, trench warfare, gay love story, English boarding school, Belgium and France battles, Somme, Ypres, death, class conflict, PTSD.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: In Memoriam (Alice Winn, author)
A stunning debut by author Alice Winn, In Memoriam is a sweeping love and war story set in England, France and Belgium in 1914 at the start and through World War I. Sidney Ellwood and Henry (Heinrich) Gaunt are close friends and roommates at Preshute College, an elite boarding school in the English countryside when World War I begins. Ellwood is a poet with a particular fondness and mastery of Tennyson. Gaunt is half-German and a student of the classics with deep knowledge of Greek and Thucydides. The war and their classmates who have enrolled (and in many cases been injured or killed) preoccupies the young men at the boarding school. When they are not romanticizing or being terrified by the prospect of war, theyengage in pranks, antics, studies and exploration of their relationships with women and with each other, both as friends as as lovers. Homosexuality in England at the time was illegal, cause for expulsion from school, arrest and military courts martial.
Faced with the suspicions because of his German heritage, Gaunt battles insinuations of cowardice and disloyalty to mother England. Challenged as a coward, and struggling to suppress his deep attraction and fondness for Ellwood, Gaunt enlists. Ellwood, a year younger, is devastated by Gaunt’s departure and writes loving letters, which unbeknownst to him threaten to expose Gaunt as gay when viewed by military censors. Gaunt is quickly immersed in the horrors of trench warfare. Unable to remain apart from Gaunt, Ellwood enlists and pulls strings in his aristocratic family to garner an assignment to Gaunt’s regiment. Gaunt is furious, fueled by fear that Ellwood will die in battle.
The two are sent on a mission with three others, and only Ellwood and one private return from No Man’s Land. Ellwood is bereft by the loss of Gaunt, and becomes a crazed, nearly suicidal soldier, forging into danger at every turn. Believed dead, Gaunt’s German fluency served him well. Gravely injured, he is taken to a German hospital where he recovers before being sent to a prisoner of war camp. Eventually Ellwood’s heroics reward him with a grievous and disfiguring injury. Gaunt and Ellwood are eventually reunited but they navigate the trauma of what was then known as shell shock, now understood as post-traumatic stress disorder.
The bucolic English boarding school contrasts starkly with the brutality of WWI trench warfare. The battle details are stunning, graphic, and gory. Hundreds of thousands of very young men were slaughtered, mowed down and blown into pieces. The contrasting tenderness of the love story between Gaunt and Ellwood are all the more poignant given the ever-present threat of death they face over the extended period of the War. The young men lost dozens of classmates and friends, and witnessed horrors hourly. The drama inherent in their love story is heightened by its existence in an era and a culture that rendered it illegal and nearly impossible. Despite their deep devotion to England and their families, the two emigrate to Brazil where same-sex relationships are tolerated.
In Memoriam is gripping and a cinematic glimpse at a violent period in history through the lens of an unusual love story. The apt title is a nod to the regular rolls of the dead, wounded and missing soldiers published in papers across England, in the era before the internet and cell phones. These in memoriam rolls are a brilliant and clever device to underscore the losses the war delivered to every community.
Please support BookLife: Reviews for Readers and independent book sellers by purchasing In Memoriam through Bookshop.org using the link below.
Absolutely loved this book.