Unexploded
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A novel of fine-tuned beauty, sharp insight and emotional subtlety – about a family in the shadow of WWII
May, 1940. Brighton. Wartime.
On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day.
It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while young Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton’s Royal Pavilion his English HQ. He spends hours with his friends imagining life in Brighton under Hitler’s rule. And as the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, her thoughts becoming tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.
Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband’s internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn’s and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest.
Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto, and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate period drama, MacLeod subjects the uncertain moorings of family to an ill-defined wartime peril. In 1940's Brighton, a German invasion is expected any day; "Fear was an infection airborne, seaborne rolling in off the Channel...." Geoffrey Beaumont has been named Superintendent of an enemy alien camp, son Philip imagines life under Hitler's rule, and his wife Evelyn struggles to adapt as the world she knows succumbs to fear. Into this fragility MacLeod introduces Otto, a German-Jewish painter who makes Evelyn's acquaintance as she visits prisoners to read to them. There are fine flourishes of style and empathy within this Man Booker long-listed novel; the author beautifully captures the weariness of paranoia, the way the fear eventually yields "to the pleasure of May blossom and the horse chestnuts fear was forgotten over a book or a weak cup of tea." MacLeod is an astonishing crafter of nuance, writing of the manner in which people "are broken by everything cannot say," perfectly capturing the paradox of people consumed by petty anti-Semitic tendencies yet worried of Hitler's coming. The plot does suffer a slight predictability, the Beaumonts weathering various betrayals and infidelities as time crawls by and the invasion fails to occur. Yet this is ultimately a fine work, laden with moments of subtle grace.
