Everyone Brave is Forgiven

We live, you see, and even a mule like me must learn. I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.

I had read an article (lost to me now) that explained the origins of Everyone Brave is Forgiven: As an author and presumably able typist, Chris Cleaves' grandfather enlisted him to type out the old man's handwritten memoirs. Cleaves was happy to oblige, and as he worked through the manuscript, he realised that he was reading a WWII story that he had never encountered before; that of the siege of Malta and those Londoners back home who kept jiving at the juke joints and dining at the Ritz even as the Germans were blitzing their city. This seemed so interesting to me that I added my name to the library's long waiting list, and having finally finished it, I can report: it was just okay. And further: as I was reading, I continually confronted every part that I didn't like with the thought, “Well, if it happened this way to the author's grandparents, then I guess it had to go in”. But then, in the afterword to my edition, Cleaves explains that his narrative is only very loosely based upon his grandparents' experiences, which forced me to reconsider everything: the parts I didn't like were the author's own inventions, and therefore, neither brave nor forgiveable. 

You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs.

The story is basically a love quadrangle: Initially, we meet Mary – a starry-eyed, upper crust girl of eighteen who leaves her Swiss finishing school to return to England and join the war effort; and while she has fantasies of intrigue and espionage, she is deflated to be posted as a teacher in an elementary school. Tom is a director of education for London, and after Mary approaches him to ask for a classroom in which to teach those misfit children who weren't evacuated to the countryside, he relents to her request because he immediately falls in love with her. Alistair is Tom's flatmate, a conservator at the Tate, who enlists on the day that war is declared, and throughout the novel, it is through Alistair's eyes that we view combat. Hilda is Mary's dearest friend; a plain-looking husband-hunter who is set up with Alistair when he returns to London on a brief leave. Unfortunately, the second Alistair and Mary's eyes meet, they fall in love; a secret they must keep in order to preserve their old friendships. 

That's the overall story arc, but Everyone Brave is Forgiven is about much more than that. The siege of Malta, as experienced by Alistair, really was a harrowing story; the starvation, the battle losses, the futility of defending a rock deep in enemy territory (but if Cleaves' grandfather was in actuality charged with keeping an eye on Winston Churchill's underwhelming and overweight son on Malta, that sounds like the more interesting story; none of which is included). When Mary and Hilda volunteer as ambulance drivers, their experience was gritty and real (and I found the scene in the basement with the rising water to be absolutely gripping; was less engaged with the ensuing morphine addiction). It hadn't occurred to me before that the majority of the bombing of London happened on the East End docks (where the poor people lived), leaving the rich West End folks free to continue their lives of thoughtless extravagance. And I really hadn't considered the irony of Britain fighting Hitler and his ideology of a superior race while, at the same time, committing the most horrible acts of racism at home: this storyline is absolutely central to the book.

After Mary's class is evacuated to the countryside, she learns that her pet student Zachary (the black son of an American entertainer; why they had to be Americans is never made clear) is being abused and starved by his foster family, and she insists that he be brought back to London and put under her tutelage. Mary assembles the rest of the unevacuated misfits – those children she refers to as the cripples, retards, a mongol – and she totally bucks the class system by attempting to educate them. Zachary himself is consistently referred to by every slur one can imagine (this includes and gets worse than jigaboo and pickaninny), and even when Mary is struck down on the sidewalk by another woman just for walking along with Zachary, she is the only character in the book who thinks of black people as wholly human (even Tom, Alistair, and Hilda make frequent racist remarks: it doesn't help that Cleaves decided to make Zachary “word blind”, and thereby incapable of learning to properly read and write). This storyline is so central, and the relationship between Mary and Zachary is so important, that I assumed it was based on Cleaves' own grandmother; but while she apparently was a teacher during the war, Cleaves makes no mention of such a stand against racism. As an invention, therefore, this felt cheap and preachy; nothing in Mary's character accounts for her willingness to put herself into danger, not to mention the damage she causes to her socialite mother's reputation and her politician father's career.

   She said, “I was thinking I loved you.”

   “I love you, too.”

   “But you're a man. You'll move on, to plunder the next settlement.”

   He nodded. “Primrose Hill.”

   “Or Hamstead.”

   “Can't I plunder you a bit more first?”

   She inspected her nails. “From time to time, I daresay. If I have nothing on.”

   “I like you best when you've nothing on.”

   She flicked his thigh. “Dirty old man.”

   “I'm twenty-four.”

   “Yes. It's indecent.”

   He worried that it was. “I do love you, you know.”

   “But do you really?”

   “Yes.”

   “But do you really, Tom?”

   “Absolutely. I'd show you the readings on my dials, but we would have to open the inspection hatch in my chest.”

   “Could we? I should like to be sure.”

   “I didn't bring the right tools.”

As for the writing: from the beginning, every conversation is filled with witty rejoinders, and while I could see this as a keep calm and carry on strategy that was initially amusing, it totally wore on me after a while. This kind of repartee might well be a coping mechanism, but I never believed for a moment that it would be the default speaking style for strangers in a bomb shelter; for officers during a bombing raid; for lovers in their correspondence; just enough already. In their private thoughts, characters think in platitudinous aphorisms, and every now and then Cleaves would parachute in a peculiar word: 

Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous, the great clash of music in an endlessly accelerating rush: on and on and on.

Lucent? Fine. Lucifugous? Even my spell-check doesn't like it; and while I love words and a challenging vocabulary, this kind of an authorial word choice seems more for his own satisfaction than the reader's. Many whole passages seemed similarly overwritten, and ultimately, I couldn't decide whether something like the following was lovely or self-satisfied:

And here was what she wanted to know (now that she had left the café, and London closed around her with its smell of coal smoke and truck exhaust and Tube ventings and railway grease and frying and horse droppings and wet masonry and exhaled cigarettes and damp worsted overcoats and quick brown water coursing in the gutters and slow brown water infusing with disintegrating newsprint in the puddles, along with the flotilla of butts already smoked) – here was what she wanted to know (as the clouds made the day dark and she pulled her mackintosh tight and crossed Chalk Farm Road between the cars with their slotted headlights that made them look as if they had just arisen after a heavy night and were fumbling for the tin of aspirin) – here was what she wanted to know: was one meant to feel certain, about love?

In his writing, Cleaves has a practise of telegraphing emotions through settings: the thousands of displaced tiles in a ruined mosaic mirroring the fractured psyches of the witnesses (and if the reader doesn't catch this, the author spells it out); the couple who recognise a growing forbidden love as they cross an unfinished pontoon bridge and decide they must go back before it's too late, oh certainly, they've gone too far already. Sigh. Another random complaint: I did not believe that Mary, upon meeting an American soldier, would be delighted to learn that she spoke with an accent – I've seen My Fair Lady; I understand the importance the British put on their accents; that they can place the residence of fellow Londoners to the nearest crossroad based on the slightest variations of vowel sounds (okay, maybe that's not actually true, but I think it's more true than an uppercrust debutante not being aware of her accent at all). And how's this for a concluding passage:

The quick bright shock of the light between the cloud and the eastern horizon: an unimaginable thing, thought Mary, a life. It was an unscrewing of tarnished brass plaques. It was one tile lost to the pattern. It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.

There were individual scenes that I liked quite a lot and I don't know if I ever really appreciated before just how devastating the London Blitz was: in my mind, everyone carried on with stiff upper lips and made it safely to the Tubes to ride out the bombing runs. To see the Londoners starving and demoralised, shuffling past the ruins of buildings and too weak to clear the rubble (not to mention the flipside; the lovely young ladies lunching at Claridge's), was an education for me. The battle scenes on Malta were likewise fascinating. But I didn't like the overall style of writing, or individual lines, or the love story structure (which, apparently, has nothing to do with Cleaves' own grandparents' story), and I didn't buy Mary's stand against racism (and didn't think that her example of such a stance justified the unrelenting use of offensive racial slurs). This wasn't the book I expected to read (which is, as always, more my fault than the author's), it wasn't a book I enjoyed, and if I could, I'd give Everyone Brave is Forgiven two and a half stars and feel generous rounding up to three.