Crossword

Richard Hopton, Sherborne Literary Society

Violets by Alex Hyde (Granta) £12.99 hardcover

Sherborne Times reader offer price of £11.99 from Winstone’s Books

When John Dryden wrote that ‘War is the trade of kings’, he might have added that historically it has in general been the trade of men. From earliest times, it was men who were associated with war: Mars, the Roman god of war, was a man. In general, it was men who caused and waged wars – with some notable female exceptions, such as Boudicea – albeit both sexes and their offspring suffered its ill effects. Violets, Alex Hyde’s first novel, examines the experience of women in war, in this case, the Second World War. Hyde is a lecturer at University College, London, whose research bears on women’s experience of war and military power.

Violets switches between the stories of two young women, both called Violet, in 1945 as they struggle with pregnancy and miscarriage amid the uncertainty and deprivation of war. Violet One miscarried twins shortly before her husband is posted to the Far East and, after a short period of recuperation, returns to the munitions factory in the Midlands where her job was ‘to drill holes in valves for submarines’. Violet Two, brought up in a strait-laced community in the South Wales valleys, was also employed in wartime factory work but became pregnant as a result of a liaison with a Polish soldier billeted on her family. She decides to escape by volunteering for overseas service in the ATS and is posted to Naples. On the ship bound for Italy she forms an unlikely friendship with the mysterious, upper-class, worldly, and well-connected Maggie. Once they arrive in Naples – ‘beautiful and bold and filthy and wrecked’, smelling of ‘diesel oil and fish’ – the ATS women were transferred to the British Army HQ which occupied a palazzo: ‘It was faded and in disrepair with sandbags at the gates, metal blockades and some windows on the ground floor boarded up’. The ATS office was ‘in a white-painted, high-ceilinged hall on the upper floor’ with ‘ornate stucco plasterwork and tall windows running along one side’.

Violets is a story about women in the maledominated world of war, about love, motherhood, and family, about doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity but also about strength, resilience, and friendship. It is written in a fragmented, impressionistic, almost oblique style, giving the novel a poetic, lyrical atmosphere. The narrative passages are interspersed with a song, an extended monologue between Violet Two and her unborn child, which lends an ethereal, other-worldly quality to the story, at odds with the rest of the Violets’ mundane, tough, damaged world.

My only reservation about the book concerns the author’s decision to dispense with inverted commas in the dialogue. In my opinion it is irritating and, occasionally, confusing.

That aside, Violets is a powerful, affecting story, one which repays careful reading and thoughtful consideration – an interesting addition to the vast literature about the Second World War.

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