Love and War - by Lydia Syson

Love and war - opposites or inextricably tangled? I’d say the latter.

I don’t know how long love and war have been linked in my own mind. Maybe since reading Eric Newby’s evocative memoir of his years as a prisoner-of-war in Italy: Love and War in the Apennines. Maybe forever.

It makes perfect sense to me that one extreme state should lead to another. As the stakes get ever higher, people really do fall in love more quickly.Anyone who condemns fictional ‘Insta-Love’ should probably read Flickerbook, the fragmented autobiography of pioneering children’s author Leila Berg. In London during the Spanish Civil War, she fends off one marriage proposal after another from International Brigade volunteers about to depart for battle. (Two of her lovers died.) Even the most hard-boiled 1930s communist activists could be surprisingly conventional when it came to wartime romance.

Neither war nor love are exactly the height of fashion in the YA world just now. Although historical fiction could hardly be more popular in adult markets, it’s another story altogether when it comes to teens. (Come to Past Imperfect? at the Society of Authors on March 16th if you want to discuss this further - it's sold out, but audio tickets are still available.) The backlash against romance is perhaps more understandable and in some ways even welcome: in its most traditional form, the genre can fit uncomfortably with contemporary gender politics. Of course it doesn't have to, and romance set in the past can offer valuable historical perspective on precisely that topic.

Happily, YA publishers haven’t given up on historical romance. Its appeal remains enormous. The best stories borrow the genre’s tropes, and redefine them, not necessarily in particularly dramatic ways.

Lively, independent and thoughtful heroines combined with well-researched, convincing settings make all the difference. In two new historical romances set in World War Two, A Time to Live and Wait for Me, both Sue Purkiss and Caroline Leech use excellent characterisation and a strong sense of family relationships to stay away from cliché. Though written for very different readerships, the two novels have a lot in common. Both explore young women’s lives on the rural home front. Both address the transformative powers of love and war. Both are deceptively sweet and simple, but are haunted by horrific events happening ‘off-stage’.

A Time to Live is one of a number of books by SASSIES in ‘Promises’, Ransom Publishing’s new

series for teenagers who struggle with reading. A hi-lo novel –– high interest, low reading age – it’s a hugely engaging love story set in occupied France, told with deft economy of plot and language. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie finds an injured British pilot and, with the help of her brother Pierre, shelters him on her family farm. Jack is a rear-gunner – a ‘tail-end Charlie’ - the most dangerous

position in a bomber crew. Sylvie and Pierre know that they are putting the whole family at risk by protecting him. Their father just wants to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. If he discovers Jack, he will hand him in without a qualm.

Everything changes when a letter arrives from a relative in Paris. The reality of what's happening on their doorstep, to friends of relatives, is brought home in a few short lines. ‘”They rounded up Jews from all over Paris. The children were separated from their parents and kept in a sports stadium for days – with no food, no water. Thousands of them…’” Sylvie’s mother reports. ‘Can you imagine - can you imagine how afraid they must have been? And now…they’ve all been taken away. No one knows where.’ In a few short lines, we have learnt of the infamous ‘Veld’Hiv Roundup’ of July 1942, when over 1300 Jews, nearly a third of these children, were held in appalling conditions in a velodrome before being shipped in cattletrucks to Auschwitz. The news encourages Sylvie to confide in her mother about Jack, and Papa, shamed by his previous efforts to hide his head in the sand, is suddenly determined to play his part. Together, the family hides Jack ‘in plain sight’, transforming him into Jacques Moulin, farmworker. Soon Sylvie has fallen for him. But to save him, she’ll have to help him escape.

A Time to Live’s concise diary format keeps events gripping and immediate, filtering the big ideas – life under occupation, the day-to-day work of the Resistance, emotional sacrifice– through the voice of a hugely likeable, resourceful heroine. It’s a wonderfully accessible way into the many pleasures of historical fiction. Appetite-whetting stuff indeed.

Caroline Leech takes forbidden love in another direction, inspired by one of the many prisoner-of-war camps in Britain whose German or Italian inmates were sent to work on local farms. I was immediately reminded of an unforgettable film I saw when I was a teenager myself, Another Time, Another Place, starring a young Phyllis Logan, and I steeled myself for heartbreak. Happily, Wait for Me is neither so bleak nor so tragic.

It’s set in 1945 in East Lothian, rather than the Highlands, and its heroine is a feisty seventeen-year-old with two brothers away in the army. She’s horrified when a German prisoner arrives to work on the farm, all the more because his face is horribly disfigured – scarred by burns sustained during the

D-Day Landings, as it transpires. You’ve guessed it – Lorna slowly falls in love with Paul, who comes from Dresden: already there is a clue that the end of the war may prove bitter-sweet.

It’s a year of growing up for Lorna, who comes to understand that the world is far less black and white than she had imagined. The love story is satisfying, but not always centre-stage: for me, the beauty of Wait for Me lies in Leech’s delicate tracing of Lorna’s changing relationships with a whole cast of characters, including other women, young and old, such as lively land girl, Nellie - glamorous, risk-taking and a real survivor – and best friend Iris, engaged to marry the horribly controlling vicar’s son, William, who is almost too repulsive, but perfectly plausible. Questions of friendship, loyalty, sexual consent and the emotional damage caused by war are woven in with care: particularly memorable scenes take place a US army base dance hall and after the return of one of Lorna’s brother on leave. It’s easy to lose yourself in this engrossing book, which offers a convincing portrait of life in a Scottish coastal community during World War Two, while exploring themes that, unfortunately, will always be relevant.

Given World-War domination of historical fiction for the young, I can’t resist also recommending a couple of books I read last year, both of which deserve prizes, plaudits and wide recognition all round for their brilliant illuminations of two much more obscure twentieth-century conflicts: Ireland’s Easter Rising and Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

In Name upon Name (the title is borrowed from Yeats) Sheena Wilkinson portrays a peculiarly complicated home front: in Belfast in 1916. Helen is the daughter of a Presbyterian father and a Catholic mother. She has a cousin on one side of the family who is an officer in the British Army and another on the other side who, despite his family’s ardent Irish nationalism, runs away to join up in – only to find himself sent to Dublin, instead of France, to put down the Rising. What’s more important? Family or country? Can you spend your whole life trying to believe two different things at once?

Identity, familial love – however you define family – politics and loyalty are also central to Elizabeth Wein’s extraordinary Black Dove, White Raven, which is also extraordinarily ambitious.Swooping from segregated 1930s America to Africa’s oldest independent country, Ethiopia, this is a complex, many-layered narrative, consisting of story fragments, flight logbooks, and journals, through which shine the alternating voices of young Theo and Em. They are the son and daughter of ‘Black Dove’ and ‘White Raven’, a pair of idealistic stunt pilots who defy race laws and convention as well as gravity in their barnstorming shows across the US. Until a freak accident kills Delia. Em’s mother Rhoda is initially struck down by grief, but eventually takes the children to live in Ethiopia, where they grow up in relative freedom on a coffee co-operative. The slow, steady build towards the war pays off in spades, allowing the landscape to come alive as much as the perfectly flawed and perfectly admirable characters who inhabit it: the last third of the book is impossible to put down. Heart in mouth, we fly above the country, in one daring mission after another, till we reach the utter horror of the Italian air attack on Addis – the too-often forgotten beginning of twentieth-century ‘total war’. I don’t suppose anybody would call this historical romance, but yes, this book too is about love and war, like no other.

Postscript: I just re-read the opening chapter of Eric Newby’s memoir. He is setting off by submarine on a mission to save Malta from capitulation ‘the worst possible kind of operation’. He says he ‘felt like one of those rather ludicrous, ill-briefed agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot.’ A reference which passed me by when I first read Love and War all those years ago, but one which will make perfect sense to readers of my own WW2 novel, That Burning Summer, published in the US by Sky Pony Press today.

www.lydiasyson.com

Guilty Pleasures, by Lydia Syson

There’s something about watching a film ‘for work’ which always feels too good to be true.  I tend to wait for an evening or weekend to indulge, as though settling down with a DVD during a working day, even notebook in hand, is somehow unjustifiably frivolous. 

But if you’re trying to capture the period spirit for a book that’s set in the twentieth century, a film made at just the right time can be an absolute goldmine.  I first cottoned onto this while I was writing A World Between Us.  I spent many hours at the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive listening to International Brigade volunteers talking about their memories of the Spanish Civil War.  Even voices recorded in the 1980s had the accents and vocabulary of a vanished era.  But not quite.  And these were formal interviews.  They didn’t really convey a sense of dialogue.

Then I watched David Lean’s This Happy Breed, made in 1944 and based on a play written five years earlier by Noël Coward.  John Mills, Celia Johnson and  Stanley Holloway are among its stars.  I’ve just found the notes I scribbled at the time, a list of little phrases that struck me because you simply never hear them any more:

‘Strike me pink!’

‘Queer ways of enjoying themselves…’

‘Thanks very much, I’m sure…’

‘Right ho!’

‘Seedy’

‘She goes on about the same…’

‘A nice way to behave’

‘Now listen here…’

‘If you must know…’

Can you hear those voices?

But this kind of research is not just about vocabulary, or speech patterns.  In fact, an obsession with period language can be positively dangerous.  That way lies caricature, even comedy – intentional or otherwise.  Mood in movies is just as important.

My new book, That Burning Summer, is set on Romney Marsh, Kent, in July and August 1940, when the Battle of Britain raged overhead and invasion was a constant and genuine threat.  This was also a time when going to the cinema – for both news and entertainment – was so central to life that even in a small town like Lydd, the programme changed two or three times a week.  Of course I wondered what kind of films my characters might have seen.  Being something of a Powell and Pressburger fan, I was delighted to discover the tongue-in-cheek espionage thriller Contraband was released at just the right moment.

Contraband played to my themes to perfection.  It was called Blackout in the United States, a follow-up to The Spy in Black, released in 1939, which also starred Conrad Veidt.  (Remember Major Strasser in Casablanca?)  And any lingering worries I had about overdoing the spyfever in That Burning Summer were quickly laid to rest as I watched Cottage to Let(Anthony Asquith,1941) - injured Spitfire pilot John Mills parachutes into loch and is ultimately revealed as leader of dangerous German spyring; Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942) – a brilliant and moving adaptation of a Graham Greene short story about the great British nightmare of the time, an English village taken over by Nazi paratroopers; and The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1942), which features this immortal exchange:

‘I’ve always thought if I wanted a nice cushy job, I’d come to England as a German spy,’ says a man in uniform, after asking a passing Army vehicle for directions to Brigade HQ.

‘I thought you were with the Brigades, Sir.’

‘Well, I’m not.  For all you know I might be a German agent.’

The history of The Next of Kin is particularly fascinating.  It was a box office hit that started life as an Army Instructional Film, hammering home the Home Front message that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. ‘A patriot can easily do as much harm as a traitor,’ remarks another character.  It’s said that Churchill wanted to ban the film, concerned that its impact on morale might outweigh its effectiveness.

When it comes to the curious overlap between documentary, drama and propaganda so peculiar to World War Two, one film stands out:  Humphrey Jenning’s magnificent Fires Were Started, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD2YYmuEzQM released by the Crown Film Unit/Ministry of Information in 1943, which records a day and a night with the Auxiliary Fire Service in London.  The characters, all fictional, are played not by actors but real firefighters, and it was filmed during the terrible winter/spring of 1940/41, at the height of the London docks bombings.  Lindsay Anderson described Jennings as ‘the only true poet of the English cinema.’  He was also ‘the man who listened to Britain’, one of the founders of Mass Observation…but that’s another story, for another time.  The good news is that the BFI has produced a complete two volume DVD collection of Humphrey Jennings’ films. I defy your eyes not to glisten at ‘Words for Battle’ (1941). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnZ5ExcXMxo

I’ll leave you with a final viewing recommendation: Dangerous Moonlight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4cu1vtIVxo (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941), a huge wartime hit whose music, ‘The Warsaw Concerto’, ultimately became more famous than the film itself.  Told in flashback, Dangerous Moonlight is the story of a Polish pianist turned pilot, Stefan Radetzky, played by the gorgeous Anton Walbrook.  Radetzky escapes internment in Romania after the Nazi invasion of Poland (not to mention the Russian one, though if I

Anton Walbrook

remember rightly, this is glossed over!) and ends up in America, giving concerts for the Polish Relief Fund.  He falls in love and marries an American reporter he first met in Warsaw.  Tortured with guilt, he soon leaves the US to join one of the Polish squadrons fighting in the Battle of Britain.  And I shall reveal no more… 

Once again, fact and fiction blurred in the making of this film.  It was shot at two RAF aerodromes near London, some of the non-speaking parts were taken by real Polish pilots, and many of its thrilling aerial combat scenes came from official footage.

There.  Writing this has assuaged my own guilt. Watching these films, and thinking about them now, has made me reconsider the relationship between truth and storytelling, and the power of fiction to affect reality.  More food for thought about exactly what I’m trying to do with the history in my own books.

I wish I could say I’m just off to watch another film.  But my current work-in-progress is set just a few decades before the birth of moving pictures.  Near the dawn of photography, as it happens…

www.lydiasyson.com

@lydiasyson

New Adult or Young Adult?

Open Book, Radio Four’s programme about all matters literary turned its attention to New Adult fiction last week. Was it, asked presenter Mariella Frostrup, just a marketing ploy? Or is there a need for a bridge between Young Adult fiction and Adult fiction?

Cue an intelligent and interesting  discussion between journalist Caroline Sanderson, writer Liz Bankes and editor Emily Thomas, which nonetheless had me grinding my teeth and throwing things at the radio.

It seems to me that the title New Adult could mean books about older teens  moving from the world of school, homework and exams into the adult world of further education, employment, unemployment, sex and parenthood.  These books already exist and are labelled Young Adult.  A New Adult label isn’t therefore strictly necessary but could serve as a useful label to identify books for and about older teens.  It might help them crossover into an adult market. It might encourage publishers and booksellers to see older teen books as a genre worth investment, and keep older teens interested in looking at the teen shelves in book shops. It could, above all, be a useful way of marketing e-books to older teen readers.

New Adult could be this...

..but is actually this

Recent books that might fit into that sort of New Adult category might include Lydia Syson’s A World Between Us – three young people caught up in the Spanish Civil War,  working as a nurse, a journalist, and a printer turned soldier.  Or Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry, about a boy whose plans to go to university are hijacked by becoming a father. Helen Grant, Melvin Burgess, Meg Rosoff ,  Sarra Manning, Mal Peet, Kevin Brooks  and many other UKYA authors often write about older teens.  These books are labelled YA or teen fiction, they are shelved as such, they are received with enthusiasm by the supposed gatekeeper. Publishers publish them, and teachers and librarians are not scared of  coming of age books.  On the contrary, they often favour them over  books aimed at younger children -  just take a look at most Carnegie shortlists.

He's 18, having sex, bringing up a child. New or Young Adult?

My next book, Salvage, has two narrators. One is Aidan, 18, who is living with an older girlfriend, Holly and her two-year-old son, Finn.  Is Aidan a Young Adult or a New Adult?  His sister Cass, the other narrator, is 16 and embarking on her first sexual relationship. Is she Young Adult or New Adult?

Unfortunately New Adult has stopped being a useful label for my books and the books of the authors mentioned above, because New Adult has come to mean ‘books about teenagers having sex, generally originally self-published, and picked up by publishers who want a slice of the action.’ Unlike most YA authors writing about sex, they include an element of soft porn (generally the softest of soft porn, almost always from a female point of view, with far more about 'panties' than throbbing or thrusting Men's Bits).  The ‘Adult’ has taken over from the ‘New’.  The quality of writing isn’t great in any of these books that I’ve read, and the sex is often boring (one New Adult book that I attempted to read seemed to have been written by someone who’d never had sex in her life, so was hopelessly vague and boring, others are just a bit tacky and embarrassing). In a matter of months New Adult has come to mean ‘rubbishy’  and ‘put that label on my books and I will kill you’ for most authors writing books about new adults.

Having said that, I think that these New Adult books are not a bad thing. Porn is generally produced by men, for men, and it’s surely good for girls to have access to their own brand, written by women. These books do address emotional issues around sex, and they generally feature interesting  and engaging characters.  They may not engage me, but I’m not their target market. If I were 16 and in possession of an e-reader, I think I’d love them.  As Malorie Blackman said recently, books are a great place for children to learn about sex.  The 'New Adult' romances, or -  to use a word invented and only used by marketing managers - 'steamies', are part of that process.

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking my daughter to university open days. I’ve sat in lecture theatres full of 17 and 18 year olds and their parents, learning about the next stage of their lives. What will they study, how will they find jobs, where will they live, how will they make friends?  I’ve had fascinating conversations with my daughter about her hopes and plans for the future, watched as she was inspired, reassured and challenged by visions of her future. I'd love to have more books to suggest to her which focus on the transition from school to adult life, which tell you what it's like to unpack your suitcase on the first day of university (and I don't mean Charles Ryder at Oxford).

New adulthood is one of the most interesting and important times of anyone’s life. It  offers writers many exciting possibilities.  Right now, though, I’d rather steer clear of the New Adult label.

Books in the future by Keren David

 

 

One over-flowing bookshelf..

My house is full of books. Seven bookcases, over-stuffed and spilling over. Bags of paperbacks waiting to go to the charity shop.

 In the attic there are three packing cases full of books that went into storage in 1999 when we moved to Amsterdam, and haven’t been unpacked since we returned. They’ve been joined by other boxes of books that we don’t want to throw out, but had to be moved when we tried to impose order. Sometimes I feel as though the books are breeding, multiplying silently, taking over the house by stealth.

Double-stacking...

I doubt my children will have a house like this. Their books will live in e-readers and tablets. Reading will be more private, more portable. Their homes will be a lot tidier, and moving will be considerably easier.

Choosing books will be different too. They'll have fewer opportunities to browse in shops and libraries. Instead, expertise and criticism will move online.  If the kindle charts are anything to go by, then books will be sold for pennies, with authors hoping to make money by selling in bulk.

Some of these things worry and frighten me -  as a writer.  I hate the idea of books ceasing to exist as physical entities. Yet, as the owner of an e-reader, I prefer having books that I can find and carry around. I think my house would be a nicer place to live in without toppling piles of books in every room.

And I’m excited by the possibilities that e-books can bring. I love the idea of adding music, film, information, interviews and other extras to my books. I’m intrigued by the idea that a  basic book might sell for £1, but the enhanced version would be sold (perhaps to existing fans) for a higher price.

Lydia Syson’s excellent debut, A World Between Us, published by HotKey is the first example I’ve seen of the books  that I dream of. It’s an epic romance set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. (I should declare an interest here, Lydia and I belong to the same writing group and I consider myself a proud auntie to her love-crossed characters, Felix, Nat and George)

The paperback is a thing of beauty, with its 30s poster style cover. But the enhanced ebook is really special. It contains fascinating background information about the rise of the Blackshirts in London, the International volunteers who fought in Spain,interviews with Lydia,  historians and (very movingly) a veteran.  It’s interesting, educational and it offers  much more than is possible in a conventional book. It's a format that fits historical books perfectly, but could be applied to many others.

Try it, think about how the concept could be used for the books you write, and the books you love, and some of your fears about the future might just fade away.