Well-researched & emotive look at the impact of the Belfast Blitz on the lives of ordinary citizens.
I know little about the city of Belfast and to my shame knew nothing about its part in WWII. Lucy Caldwell’s debut historical fiction novel puts that right by exploring the four nights that comprised the harrowing events of the Belfast Blitz as seen through the eyes of one family, laying bare the impact these events had on the ordinary person. Through vivid descriptions and stark prose, Caldwell has rendered the devastation and damage of the conflict something that I am unlikely to forget. From the destruction of the swathes of terraced houses in the north of the city where the objective can have only have been to instil terror into the hearts and minds of the residents, to the makeshift morgues and piles of bodies not yet in coffins, this is an incredibly evocative look at the Belfast Blitz (April to May 1941),
The Bell’s are a middle-class family in a city which has so far escaped the worst of WWII when the novel opens in April 1941 and are comprised of doctor Phillip, wife Florence, daughters Audrey and Emma and younger son, Paul. To an outside observer Florence is a happily married wife and mother, but emotionally she is far more conflicted than it appears, pining for a first love that she only allows herself to covet during the weekly visit to church. Eldest daughter, Audrey, is twenty-one and works in the tax office. She looks set for marriage to a doctor who works alongside her father while privately harbouring serious doubts about whether such a conventional future is right for her. Emma is a serious and stubborn eighteen-year-old who in the first throes of a clandestine relationship with an older female at the First Aid Post where she is volunteering and feeling increasingly stifled at home. Told from the perspectives of mother and both daughters within the Bell family, the novel also loosely follows the stories of several people connected to the family. This helps to gives a broader understanding of the impact of the events of the Belfast Blitz across society and social class.
The period detail and descriptions of a ravaged Belfast and its citizens are excellent and evidently well-researched, and I found this aspect of the novel infinitely superior to the characterisation, with both Bell sisters frustratingly underexplored. Furthermore both of the sister’s story arcs are disappointingly predictable (especially that of Emma, the LGBT representative) and it is their mother, a woman some twenty years older, that I found more sensitively explored and memorably well-observed. I did find the prose wasn’t always the easiest to follow and at points it felt like the story was one of discrete scenes stitched together that lacked cohesion. However for all the atrocity, carnage and bloodshed contained within this short but poignant novel it is not without hope and a real sense of optimism, not just for Belfast as a city but for all its citizens.
The Bell’s are a middle-class family in a city which has so far escaped the worst of WWII when the novel opens in April 1941 and are comprised of doctor Phillip, wife Florence, daughters Audrey and Emma and younger son, Paul. To an outside observer Florence is a happily married wife and mother, but emotionally she is far more conflicted than it appears, pining for a first love that she only allows herself to covet during the weekly visit to church. Eldest daughter, Audrey, is twenty-one and works in the tax office. She looks set for marriage to a doctor who works alongside her father while privately harbouring serious doubts about whether such a conventional future is right for her. Emma is a serious and stubborn eighteen-year-old who in the first throes of a clandestine relationship with an older female at the First Aid Post where she is volunteering and feeling increasingly stifled at home. Told from the perspectives of mother and both daughters within the Bell family, the novel also loosely follows the stories of several people connected to the family. This helps to gives a broader understanding of the impact of the events of the Belfast Blitz across society and social class.
The period detail and descriptions of a ravaged Belfast and its citizens are excellent and evidently well-researched, and I found this aspect of the novel infinitely superior to the characterisation, with both Bell sisters frustratingly underexplored. Furthermore both of the sister’s story arcs are disappointingly predictable (especially that of Emma, the LGBT representative) and it is their mother, a woman some twenty years older, that I found more sensitively explored and memorably well-observed. I did find the prose wasn’t always the easiest to follow and at points it felt like the story was one of discrete scenes stitched together that lacked cohesion. However for all the atrocity, carnage and bloodshed contained within this short but poignant novel it is not without hope and a real sense of optimism, not just for Belfast as a city but for all its citizens.