Mind Picker: The Evening Chorus: A Novel

Seventy years after VE Day, I think an author needs to have something new to say about WWII in order to go to the bother. With Coventry I thought that Helen Humphreys did a wonderful job of memorialising the German bombing of that cathedral city – a less wonderful job of splicing a coincidence-rich human interest story onto the grit and horror of that bombing – but with The Evening Chorus, Humphreys revisits wartime England and focuses on the human interest angle while ignoring (for the most part) the grit and horror of WWII. To what end?

We begin with James Hunter: a thirty-something school teacher who joined the RAF in order to avoid up-close combat and actually witnessing death. His plane is shot down on its first run and James is taken to a German POW camp, ensuring that the reluctant soldier never sullies his hands with enemy blood. As the Germans follow the Geneva Convention and its rules against forced labour for captured officers, James is bored – uninterested in the debate clubs and other hobbies of his fellow inmates – and when he spies a pair of singing redstarts on the other side of the camp's barbed-wire fence, he decides to begin a scientific study of their behaviour. James is able to observe as the more attractive of these two original males finds a mate, as this pair builds a nest, and although he is too far from them to see how many eggs are laid or how many chicks hatch, he does record how many trips the adult birds make to fetch food for their young. James isn't present when the fledglings leave their nest, and although the camp is soon sent on a forced relocation march (and we never hear from James again while in captivity), we are to believe that based on the few weeks of notes he made, James will eventually publish the definitive book on redstart behaviour. This is loosely based on the wartime experience of John Buxton, but if Humphrey's purpose was to tell Buxton's story, I think she ought to have told Buxton's story.

In the POW camp, we also meet its Kommandant: a Classics professor who is supportive of James' scientific efforts. Not only does the Kommandant give James a German fieldguide, but he also brings the POW to a wooded area to see a wayward flock of cedar waxwings (and this is apparently also based on a true story). We even meet the Kommandant ten years later, where he has rejoined his former life and reminisces about his loathsome time as a Nazi officer, but I found this plotline to be the worst of modern moral equivalence: I have no doubt that there were many, many good Germans who were swept up in the Nazi machine, but as we collectively decided at the Nuremberg Trials, the “I was only following orders” defense is no defense at all. By trying to make a sympathetic character out of the man under whose watch escapees were executed, Humphreys seems to be trying to undermine the accepted history of the last good war: we on the Allied side were the good guys and fiction that attempts to find nuances in that position is of questionable value to me. To be clear: this isn't a Schindler's List type storyline about a Yad Vashem who proved himself to be a righteous man above concern for his own safety, but the insertion of a “good Nazi” for questionable fictional purposes. Seventy years after VE Day, as the eyewitnesses are all but gone, there ought to be a valid literary purpose for such a character.

There is a separate storyline from the point-of-view of James' young wife Rose: ten years younger than her husband, Rose appears to have married him after the briefest of courtships in order to escape the clutches of her controlling and nasty mother. Happily playing house in her husband's absence, the fact that he is safely kept away from danger in a POW camp seems to contribute to Rose's lack of guilt in starting up a romance with another young RAF officer, which provides the opportunity to insert a third historical anecdote. (I have no problem accepting the coincidence of Toby's plane crash-landing in the forest in Rose's back yard – he would have understood that that area was the most appropriate place to set the plane down – but the dog bringing the rabbit's foot home to Rose made me roll my eyes so hard.) Ten years later, Rose is back living with her nasty mother, wistfully recalling how much nicer life had been during the war years. As if that isn't bad enough, I happen to agree with her mother: if Rose is now 33 and has never had a job or tried to support herself, it might be about time.

Lastly, there are sections from the point-of-view of James' sister, Enid, and this was my favourite character: I totally believed and empathised with everything that happens to her, from losing her lover in the Blitz to having her professional aspirations curtailed by the returning male workforce after the war was finally over. I even believed that, after ten years, Enid's view of Rose would have softened.

I've seen reviewers describe Humphrey's prose here as “limpid” and “restrained”, but to me, it just came off as shallow; as though most thoughts were left unfinished. At under 300 pages (small pages, with a largish font and wide margins), The Evening Chorus feels slight and gestural; like an outline for a more hefty work. There's something very obvious about a POW enjoying freedom vicariously through the birds he sees flying overhead but to have every other character connecting to themselves through nature seems to belabour that main theme, leading to some strange philosophy:

• The shearwaters that fly on course and the ones that get thrown about by the wind mostly end up in the same place, so perhaps effort doesn't matter, isn't what ensures survival.

• This is why James likes birds – because they are all possibility. They make a line in the air, the invisible line of their flight, and this line can join up with other lines or lead somewhere entirely new. All you have to do is believe that the line exists and learn how to follow it.

So, no, I didn't really like The Evening Chorus, and as short as it is, I found myself impatient to finish it. To return to my original question: To what end was this book written? It added nothing to my understanding of WWII, or to my understanding of people in general, and to the extent that it might be a story about two blameless men who find themselves on opposite ends of a conflict but who nevertheless discover their shared humanity over a mutual love of nature, well, blah: seventy years after VE Day, it's important to remember that freedom and democracy were worth fighting for; the fight for Europe was not a grey area, ripe for reexamination.