“Fire!” yells the old man on the south chapel roof.Famously, Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic”, and in fiction about WWII – an event that caused the deaths of 50 to 80 million people – it's often most compelling to focus on the stories of a few individuals, bringing the tragedy down to a level that the human brain can comprehend. To this end, Coventry tells the story of one night – November 14, 1940 – through the eyes of two women, with a couple of flashbacks thrown in to set the scene.
From the cathedral roof Harriet can clearly see the neighbouring spires of Christ Church and Holy Trinity Church. She can see the dark hunch of roofs and the rivering streets between them, but after that the buildings fall off into shadow. The fire appears as a small orange smudge in the distance. It seems so far away that Harriet feels more relief than worry at first, until she remembers that most of the large factories in Coventry are on the outskirts of the city, right where the fire begins to bloom across the horizon line.
For a few minutes the fire-watchers live up to their name – four dark figures stamped against a moonlit sky, standing sentinel on the roof of the cathedral while the edges of the city begin to curl up and burn.
If I knew WWII history better, I would have recognised the date of November 14, 1940 as when the Germans bombed the British city of Coventry, destroying its 500-year-old cathedral; the only British cathedral to fall during the war. That would have made the opening scene – with Harriet on the cathedral's roof, posing as a man to fill in as a fire-watcher for her injured neighbour – that much more urgent, but the absence of foreshadowing didn't lessen the tension. As the cathedral begins to burn, Harriet decides to help a young man – Jeremy, a newcomer to the city – find his mother. Meanwhile, Jeremy's mother Maeve begins searching for her son. In a flashback chapter, we learn that Harriet had met Maeve at the dawn of WWI; immediately after Harriet had sent her newly-wedded husband off to meet his fate in the trenches of Belgium. And this is the part of the book that really bothered me: as a reader, I hate a big coincidence, and when you set up a situation where two women – who spent a couple of hours together, 26 years ago – have their journeys chronicled from alternating points of view, and you know they're going to meet up, and the whole point of the plot becomes the bringing of the two of them together, there's a weakening of dramatic tension as I'm frogmarched towards the big-coincidence-as-climax moment that I don't even want to arrive at. **spoiler** And in the end, there's really no need for them to meet, so I was afraid that the one night stand between Harriet and Jeremy was going to lead to a baby, and as I was reading, I kept thinking, “She better not be pregnant, but at least then there's a reason for the plot – two solitary women will be joined by blood and have a legacy for the future – but on the other hand, she better not be pregnant...**spoiler**
What does work, however, are all the small moments that these women witness along the way, as the Germans kept up the bombing raid until dawn. There are many tragedies, always immediate and at the individual level, as when a good-natured man dies while trying to share a twist of tea or when the voice pleading beneath the rubble goes silent before enough of the hot bricks can be removed by bloody and blistered fingers or when an entire family is discovered in a frozen domestic tableau, having suffocated where they sat as a bomb sucked the oxygen out of their home. The danger and the fear and the exhaustion of a night-long bombing raid is perfectly captured in these small moments, and as another nice touch: the beginning of the book has several flashbacks, as I noted, but once the main journey of Jeremy and Maeve trying to find each other begins, all of the action is in the present tense, without chapter breaks, and I began to find it relentless; began hoping for another flashback to get a break from all the fires and rubble and dead bodies. This format really worked for me. But then a pointless flash-forward is tacked onto the end, and, meh.
Another curiosity: Harriet had received a letter from her husband while he was off fighting – which is shared in full – and in the acknowledgments, author Helen Humphreys states that this was an actual letter written by her own grandfather who fought at Ypres in 1914. It is a surprisingly compassionate letter – surprising for having being written by a soldier while sitting in a trench – which says at one point, “Whatever happens, you must not believe that the Germans are worse than us.” It then goes on to give examples of German soldiers helping their injured enemies. Now, this would have been written before the Huns began their widely condemned gassing campaigns, and certainly long before the atrocities that the Germans committed during WWII, so I find it to be a very curious document for Humphreys to have decided to include. On the one hand, if the bombers were flying so low that Harriet could make out the faces of the pilots, the Luftwaffe was close enough to see that they were targeting homes and fleeing civilians. On the other hand, the Allies eventually did the same thing to German targets – not to mention the H bombs in Japan – but that was well in the future for the characters of this book. Whatever happens, you must not believe that the Germans are worse than us. That's such an extraordinary statement for a soldier to have made that perhaps Humphreys couldn't help but want to preserve her grandfather's insight, or perhaps it was meant to be ironic (considering Harriet's husband's ultimate fate), or perhaps, this is an unsavoury bit of moral equivalence that undermines the entire experience that is suffered by Harriet and Maeve and the other innocent civilians that endured the night of November 14, 1940. Just a curious inclusion in a book about WWII.
In the end, this was an uneven reading experience for me: I liked the small details but not the overall story arc. I appreciated learning about this bit of history that I hadn't known before, and for the most part, I enjoyed Humphreys' writing style. A middle-of-the-road 3 star read.
Coventry -- like The Girls -- was one of the books on the reading list for that Third Age Learning course that the library will be hosting this summer. I thought it would be better -- and I really wish I could know what the prof will have to say about this one.
A writing tic that put me off while reading this was the repeated use of noting how light changes as it comes through a window:
Over his shoulder she can see the sky lightening in the window, changing the shape of the darkness every few moments. Now it looks like the mane of a lion. Now it looks like a sail.
or
She remembers a patch of light on the wall opposite, how it changed shape as the sun moved up in the sky. When she first woke it was a triangle, and when she actually got out of bed it had stretched out to a rectangle.
I can't be bothered to find more examples, but I'm thinking there were at least four passages like this. Is that poetic or careless? If I noticed it, was I supposed to? I certainly didn't like it...
