It’s a testament to Winn’s storytelling prowess that by then, the plainest of language – name, rank, age – serves to convey an entire life and all that it might have been filled with had it not been cut so senselessly short. The book’s title alludes not only to a poem by Tennyson, but to the obituaries column in the Preshutian – and it’s with this roll call of the dead that In Memoriam closes. Throughout, she artfully switches perspectives and settings, leaving the reader in desperate suspense over fates and fortunes. Acts of revenge, moonlit escapes from POW camps, serendipities just wild enough to be credible – all bound from the page with a clarity best described as cinematic, while even in the direst moments Winn’s dialogue thrums with mirth and furious intelligence. “It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children,” Ellwood notes, still just a teenager himself.Īt heart, In Memoriam is a love story, but one with an adventure woven through it. Eventually, the simple word “red” is used to signify unending horror. She takes the reader into battle at Loos and at the Somme, matter-of-factly describing the butchery that leaves soldiers literally spilling their guts. Even in the direst moments, Winn’s dialogue thrums with mirth and furious intelligenceĪlthough Winn is interested in what war does to the self and to abstract notions of beauty, bravery and home, she doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the frontline. This is the conflict depicted from a 21st-century perspective, however the novel’s increasingly pacifist protagonists certainly have no time for Rupert Brooke’s “bone-chillingly soppy” verse. Ellwood is partly inspired by Siegfried Sassoon, for instance, while the ghosts of the young men Vera Brittain lost never feel far away.

In Memoriam acknowledges some of the period’s best-known sources. As Ellwood himself soon realises, his “useless, incomprehensible eloquence” has no place there. Ellwood soon follows, his arrival in the trenches sparking rage in his horrified friend. Both have more to hide besides their latent sexuality, and as anti-German feelings rise, Gaunt, who has just turned 18, is compelled by his Prussian aristocrat mother to enlist.

Opposing it is Henry Gaunt, a tall fellow, awkward even by the standards of his peers (he can barely communicate with his twin sister), who has boxed his way to respect among his classmates but is tortured by intense, forbidden feelings for his best friend, Sidney Ellwood.Ĭharming, glamorous, Tennyson-quoting Ellwood feels the same way about Gaunt, though their banter prevents them from confessing their “abnormalities” to each other. Throughout, Winn inserts extracts from the school newspaper, the Preshutian, which is how we learn that the debating society has been discussing the motion “In the opinion of the House, war is a necessary evil”.

In memoriam alice winn