Book Review: In Memoriam by Alice Winn
By Amruta Srinivasan
I don’t really know what I was expecting when I began In Memoriam. Yet another doomed war love story? Would the star crossed lovers die at the end, tragically, fingers interwoven, hand in unlovable hand? Or would they persist, and would In Memoriam be one of the very few wartime love stories that gives its characters a form of happiness? This novel was somehow all and none of these at once.
It started out with the well known script—boy knows boy, boy has undying love for boy, boy quotes Keats and Tennyson to boy—you know how it goes. The first parts of In Memoriam is formulaic, yes, but the love and tension between Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood is incandescent. You expect nearly everything in the beginning bits, and yet, you walk along that beaten path as if you are seeing it anew. It’s probably the only real problem I have with In Memoriam, and still, I can explain it away.
The real meat of the book lies in the war, of course. The Great War. It seems silly to say that those descriptions made me truly understand the severity of such a war. It’s a fictionalized rendition of horrors that occurred more than a century ago. Still, Winn’s passages on the trenches and no-man’s-land shook me to my core. I knew, suddenly, the real and horrific impact of this war that I labored over in textbooks. All these young men and their real grisly deaths, their struggles, their loss of hope and innocence—I felt them all. It mimics the countless nameless wars with its senseless cruelty, and the ways that humanity manages to create bigger and badder weapons to kill more people and cause more suffering. I am not trying to proselytize from my soapbox, or to present my regurgitated thoughts on war. At least, I hope I am not. But these boys, these young boys, barely even men—they are dead. In Memoriam forces you to come to terms with that.
Alice Winn knows how to write her side characters just as strongly as her main. Throughout the book, these lovely soldiers pop up and die, pop up and die. Just as you get to like them, they have been speared with a bayonet, or killed by a grenade. You alternate between being as jaded as Ellwood and having to put the book down, the soldier’s In Memoriam obituary echoing in your ears. Oh, the obituaries. Young lives summed up in a neat, concise paragraph that states “he dies painlessly”. They are interspersed throughout the book, and are heartbreaking every time.
In Memoriam is, yes, a grand and sweeping love story, but it is also a tribute to those forgotten soldiers who died for England, for Germany, for France, for these meaningless borders and fake ideals of patriotism. 4 out of 5 stars for this beautiful novel.
