After the War
by Patricia Fenton
Not quite two years ago this reviewer saluted the emergence of Patricia Fenton as a ‘new and rare talent’ with the publication of her debut ‘War Bride’, before rabbiting on about how history is so often the story of ordinary people doing occasionally extraordinary things in frequently extraordinary situations. I’m delighted that her second novel, ‘After the War’, both confounds the myth of a second novel inevitably being inferior to the first, and strengthens my view of history’s nature.
To explain: one of her characters in ‘After the War’ hits the nail firmly on the head in saying: “All these years later the war casts a dark shadow. Books, movies, TV series—they’re all about the heroics but they don’t tell the real stories, do they?” Generally correct, Stephanie, but not this book, and there are two reasons for that.
The first is that Fenton does ‘ordinary’ with style, and while this story is bereft of the biggest and most savage war in history as a backdrop, it has the very human (and perhaps even ‘ordinary’?) quality and strength of Evie and Frank’s love to provide one as they delight in the small things of life and the good times that come from them as they ‘soldier on’ post-war.
Giving rise to that, the second reason is Fenton’s near-psychic understanding of people and their motivations which ensures that her story is, like Jimmy Stewart’s preferred bourbon, ‘always neat, but never gaudy’.
As a migrant myself, I can affirm that Fenton’s research into what might be termed ‘the migrant experience’ has been searching, extensive and above all, valid. She captures precisely what the Scots know as ‘the longing for my ain folk’; the benefits of improved living-standards as a result of ‘just getting on with it’; the earning of respect through the work ethic possessed by those determined to validate a choice made for the best of reasons. All these things are very familiar to Evie as she wrestles with ‘hiraeth’, her own longing for her home, for her people and for her Welsh Valleys.
Not all war bride stories are happy ones, and Fenton acknowledges that. Some couldn’t settle, despite the best of reasons, and in fact one knows of some who packed it in, went ‘home’ and found that what they had ‘endured’ until they could do so no longer, was infinitely better than the ‘home’ they remembered. Evie was spared that for she returned only in spirit, and spirit has a way of being unsusceptible to empirical evidence. Especially is this so where that evidence features economic austerity, the presence of bomb shelters in backyards and ten-year-old bomb-sites flourishing weeds.
Moving on, though, the pictures Fenton draws from her childhood memories live and breathe accuracy. Anyone who grew up in post-war NZ will recall the road presence of large and inevitably somewhat battered American V-sixes and V-eights; the thrill of the transistor radio; the amazement of television and the inability of the generation who fought depression and war to understand some of the actions and attitudes of the ‘boomers’ they produced. In that last, the author’s depiction of the Weston children, David and Christine, and their friends have the unmistakable stamp of parental experience producing the “uh-huh” of recognition.
Enough of the book for, as with ‘War Bride’, one really has to read it in order to appreciate both the flavour of Frank and Evie’s journey and the sense of loss that accompanies its ending. Of more moment might be the question: what makes Patricia Fenton such an outstanding writer?
The answer to that might incorporate the amount, the range and the quality of her research, for she was neither war bride nor immigrant. It might also involve the acknowledgement of her skill in weaving together the stories, both conflicting and harmonising, of diverse and separate people. It might even acknowledge her kinship to the main subjects of this work.
But it will definitely include her knowledge of people and her ease in representing them in daily situations, an ease that indicates the nature and amount of her empathy with ordinary–there’s that word again—people, their lives, and their stories. This, more than anything else, is why my last review of Fenton’s work opened with the assertion that hers is a new and rare talent.
‘After the War’ simply makes me rest my case while it poses, for Ms Fenton, the head-scratcher of how she will follow an act like this, for not to do so would constitute a crime against nature and literature both. Brava, Patricia Fenton.
by Patricia Fenton
Not quite two years ago this reviewer saluted the emergence of Patricia Fenton as a ‘new and rare talent’ with the publication of her debut ‘War Bride’, before rabbiting on about how history is so often the story of ordinary people doing occasionally extraordinary things in frequently extraordinary situations. I’m delighted that her second novel, ‘After the War’, both confounds the myth of a second novel inevitably being inferior to the first, and strengthens my view of history’s nature.
To explain: one of her characters in ‘After the War’ hits the nail firmly on the head in saying: “All these years later the war casts a dark shadow. Books, movies, TV series—they’re all about the heroics but they don’t tell the real stories, do they?” Generally correct, Stephanie, but not this book, and there are two reasons for that.
The first is that Fenton does ‘ordinary’ with style, and while this story is bereft of the biggest and most savage war in history as a backdrop, it has the very human (and perhaps even ‘ordinary’?) quality and strength of Evie and Frank’s love to provide one as they delight in the small things of life and the good times that come from them as they ‘soldier on’ post-war.
Giving rise to that, the second reason is Fenton’s near-psychic understanding of people and their motivations which ensures that her story is, like Jimmy Stewart’s preferred bourbon, ‘always neat, but never gaudy’.
As a migrant myself, I can affirm that Fenton’s research into what might be termed ‘the migrant experience’ has been searching, extensive and above all, valid. She captures precisely what the Scots know as ‘the longing for my ain folk’; the benefits of improved living-standards as a result of ‘just getting on with it’; the earning of respect through the work ethic possessed by those determined to validate a choice made for the best of reasons. All these things are very familiar to Evie as she wrestles with ‘hiraeth’, her own longing for her home, for her people and for her Welsh Valleys.
Not all war bride stories are happy ones, and Fenton acknowledges that. Some couldn’t settle, despite the best of reasons, and in fact one knows of some who packed it in, went ‘home’ and found that what they had ‘endured’ until they could do so no longer, was infinitely better than the ‘home’ they remembered. Evie was spared that for she returned only in spirit, and spirit has a way of being unsusceptible to empirical evidence. Especially is this so where that evidence features economic austerity, the presence of bomb shelters in backyards and ten-year-old bomb-sites flourishing weeds.
Moving on, though, the pictures Fenton draws from her childhood memories live and breathe accuracy. Anyone who grew up in post-war NZ will recall the road presence of large and inevitably somewhat battered American V-sixes and V-eights; the thrill of the transistor radio; the amazement of television and the inability of the generation who fought depression and war to understand some of the actions and attitudes of the ‘boomers’ they produced. In that last, the author’s depiction of the Weston children, David and Christine, and their friends have the unmistakable stamp of parental experience producing the “uh-huh” of recognition.
Enough of the book for, as with ‘War Bride’, one really has to read it in order to appreciate both the flavour of Frank and Evie’s journey and the sense of loss that accompanies its ending. Of more moment might be the question: what makes Patricia Fenton such an outstanding writer?
The answer to that might incorporate the amount, the range and the quality of her research, for she was neither war bride nor immigrant. It might also involve the acknowledgement of her skill in weaving together the stories, both conflicting and harmonising, of diverse and separate people. It might even acknowledge her kinship to the main subjects of this work.
But it will definitely include her knowledge of people and her ease in representing them in daily situations, an ease that indicates the nature and amount of her empathy with ordinary–there’s that word again—people, their lives, and their stories. This, more than anything else, is why my last review of Fenton’s work opened with the assertion that hers is a new and rare talent.
‘After the War’ simply makes me rest my case while it poses, for Ms Fenton, the head-scratcher of how she will follow an act like this, for not to do so would constitute a crime against nature and literature both. Brava, Patricia Fenton.
Review by M J Burr
Title: After the War
Author: Patricia Fenton
Publisher: Heritage Press
ISBN: 9781991097125
RRP: $30.00
Available: Available as a paperback in book shops throughout NZ and as an ebook from Heritage Press heritagepress.nz
Author: Patricia Fenton
Publisher: Heritage Press
ISBN: 9781991097125
RRP: $30.00
Available: Available as a paperback in book shops throughout NZ and as an ebook from Heritage Press heritagepress.nz
RSS Feed
