The author shows how
war changes everything, everyone who is involved in it and every bit of
once-imagined permanence and stability. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy
of The Witness)
The
Shock Of The Light by Lori Inglis Hall is a lengthy and complex novel,
which tackles a variety of themes while centering on the years of World War 2.
The main characters are Tessa and Theo, twins growing up in Cambridge in the
interwar years with a pacifist father and a French mother. They share
everything, developing a very close bond, but the reader is aware from the
outset that they are very different people.
When Theo goes to university in England, Tessa heads to Paris and the Sorbonne, but when she returns, she has changed. She is less open with her brother who feels that she is hiding something - not that he doesn’t have secrets of his own. But then war breaks out, and despite their father’s objections, both go off to serve.
Theo joins the RAF and flies Spitfires while Tessa, bored with the secretarial work which seems to be about all that is open to her, eventually joins the Special Operations Executive and is parachuted into France.
The central part of the novel deals with the wartime experiences of both twins – and this is not a glamorous tale of derring-do and heroic exploits. Those do occur, but this war is a frightening, dirty experience which will not end well for either Theo or Tessa whose lives are often very messy. The author shows how war changes everything, everyone who is involved in it and every bit of once-imagined permanence and stability.
The narrative moves on to the post-war years, the Nuremberg trials, the revelations of betrayal, the concentration camps and the horrors of not knowing what happened to loved ones. And indeed, sometimes the horrors of knowing exactly what happened. I certainly don’t want to give spoilers for what is a well-constructed and well-told tale, so I will not give away the details of the plot. But a number of themes are explored.
One, of course, is the bond between twins and how their closeness can never disguise the fact of their being very much their own people. Another is the role of women in the early and mid-20th Century and how it played into the hands of people who exploited it for their own ends, both good and evil, and how now, in the 21st Century, it is being exposed. It makes for impressive addition to the fictional accounts of World War 2. - Margaret von Klemperer
The Shock Of The Light by Lori Inglis Hall is published by The Borough Press: ISBN 978-0-00-870132-1
Posts
