Sidney, I am in trouble with my book. I have much of the data from the States' records and a slew of personal interviews to start the story of the Occupation -- but I can't make them come together in a structure that pleases me. Straight chronology is too tedious.The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society starts off promisingly: It is 1946, and through a series of letters, we meet Juliet Ashton; a successful wartime humorist whose recently-published collected essays are making her a celebrity. As she casts around for her next book's subject, a letter reaches her from a resident of Guernsey in the Channel Islands -- the only British soil to be occupied by the Germans during WWII. Through this chance acquaintance, Juliet learns of the titular literary society, and as she becomes more and more intrigued, various members of the society begin to correspond with her, and Juliet decides that they will be the subject of her next book.
The epistolary form worked well enough in this beginning bit: as Juliet and the Islanders tell each other of their experiences during the war, the letters are an organic way of infodumping to one another, and as the info was conveyed through anecdotes, it was also entertainingly told. In addition to stories about the Occupation (which I hadn't known about, so found intriguing) the members of the literary society also shared stories about the books they had read and their profound impact, and as I'm a bookish-type person, I'm interested in tales about literature as sustenance (I was especially touched by the simple farmer, Clovis, and his discovery of poetry). But halfway through the book Juliet decides to visit Guernsey to meet everyone in person and things go off the rails. Instead of concentrating on the Occupation, Juliet sends letters to both her publisher and her best friend, telling them about the now -- which becomes a Jane Austen-lite love-triangle and series of implausible events -- and the epistolary format becomes strained and unsatisfactory.
As for the format, I appreciate lines like, Did you know that the Islanders ground bird-seed for flour until they ran out of it?, but am impatient with lines like, What an inspired present you sent Kit -- red satin tap shoes covered with sequins. (I'm sure Sidney knew what he sent, there must be a more elegant way of introducing those shoes, even if they don't appear again…) And the authors must have felt the strain of committing to the format to the end since they had to introduce a notebook for a character to suddenly record her Miss Marple-type detective work in (the only way to convey info that one wouldn't put into a letter).
And the implausibilities are, I suppose spoilery: Juliet would want to adopt Kit -- and everyone who raised the little girl would be fine with it -- after being on Guernsey for a few months? Or that she would definitely be in love with and suggest marriage to Dawsey in that same time frame (after telling Mark she would never jump the gun again)? That Sidney would tell Isola that he's gay in their first conversation (in an atmosphere where Alan Turing -- who broke the Enigma Code -- could be sent to jail for homosexual acts)? That they would proceed to discuss Oscar Wilde and then discover letters from Oscar Wilde?! Everything about Elizabeth -- from her affair with the one noble German soldier to her heroic sacrifices, even while she had a child to raise. And the whole Billee Bee and Gilly Gilbert subplot, pahlease! /end spoiler And on top of the implausibilities is the feeling that the whole wartime experience was sanitised for your enjoyment: I've read many opinions lately that the German concentration camps should never be used for fictional purposes, and even though this book had POW camps (not Jewish or Holocaust-related), there was something manipulative about their inclusion; a toe-dip of horror for this light-hearted take on WWII.
In response to the quote I started with (which seems like a mission statement from the authors), Sidney replies:
You already have the core -- you just don't know it yet. I am talking about Elizabeth McKenna. Didn't you ever notice how everyone you interviewed sooner or later talked about Elizabeth? Lord, Juliet. Who painted Booker's portrait and saved his life and danced down the street with him? Who thought up the lie about the Literary Society -- and then made it happen? Guernsey wasn't her home, but she adapted to it and to the loss of her freedom. How? She must have missed Ambrose and London, but she never, I gather, whined about it. She went to Ravensbriik for sheltering a slave worker…Juliet, how did a girl, an art student who never held a job in her life, turn herself into a nurse, working six days a week in the hospital?...Think long and hard and tell me if Elizabeth could be the heart of your book.It might have been "tedious" to tell Elizabeth's story with "straight chronology", but I rather wish that that had been the book that was written here by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (and the reason for the two authors is an interesting story itself). It was an easy listen, and for the first half I thought I was enjoying myself, but by the end, my eyeballs hurt from rolling so hard in their sockets. Three stars is an average of the good and the bad, not really a recommendation.
