"A girl was never ruined by books," my mother used to say. I've spent most of my life trying to prove that wrong.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Unexploded: Enough to Put You off WWII Novels

One should never say that there have been too many books about anything, but after reading Unexploded by Alison MacLoed I've been seriously considering calling for a moratorium on WWII novels.

I approached this book about life in Brighton in the months after Dunkirk with good expectations, thinking that MacLoed was part some how of Alistair MacLoed's clan.  And while she certainly is his kin in the grand scheme of Scottish affairs, her novel is orders of magnitude less interesting than other books by clan members.

The pedestrian story--kids who admire Hitler, a middle class woman who falls in love with a Jewish enemy alien, her Mosley-loving husband, their char with a heart of gold--has little new in it.  More importantly, the story is not told in a way that adds anything to our understanding of the period or of the human condition.

MacLoed and her editors are also extremely sloppy. How can you trust a book that  has a major character thinking about getting penicillin to cure a dental abcess and taking some parcetemol to counter the pain even thoug neither drug was available commercially until after the War? 

How it made the 2013 Man Booker long list is beyond me!

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