The Love-charm of Bombs
Restless Lives in the Second World War
-
- £9.99
-
- £9.99
Publisher Description
When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded gruelling nights of sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a love-charm'. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and infidelities begun.
The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War and their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London and post-war Vienna and Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite its unending parade of declarative sentences, this is an affecting, critically perceptive contribution to history, literary history, and literature itself. Centering her story on Blitz-battered London between 1940 and 1945, Feigel (Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930 1945), a specialist in British culture in the 1930s and 40s, vividly brings to life the tangled professional and amorous links between her five main characters, all of them writers Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macauley, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (a.k.a. Henry Green), and Hilde Spiel and the many others in their lives. More importantly, she sensitively illuminates their literary and other works by investigating the texts themselves for keys to their lives, thoughts, and loves "art in the service of life," as well as "life in the service of art." For Feigel, her protagonists' London was not the city of propagandists' civic engagement but one of romantic and sexual exuberance never recovered in the inevitable post-war letdown. For most of them, "the war remained a charmed pocket of unrepeatable happiness." It's hard to imagine any reader of Feigel's book not wanting to read or revisit her main characters' novels and other writings. An absorbing, insightful work. Map and photos.
