Challenge Tuesday – 33

This will be a disjointed review I’m afraid, as I finished the book about 15 minutes ago and am still thinking it through!

Book 33 – Miss Carter’s War, by Sheila Hancock. In 1948, Marguerite Carter – war-damaged, recent Cambridge graduate – takes her first steps towards the future she had fought for. The story begins as she starts her first teaching job and follows Marguerite through the next 55 years of her life: her personal triumphs and traumas set against the ever-changing world. From grammar schools and bombed-out buildings to sexual liberation, through the legalisation of homosexuality and the tragedy of AIDS, to the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher and finishing at the anti-Iraq War marches, the book ties in Marguerite’s changing attitudes with the cultural divide between those whose lives were scarred by the war, and those who came after.

This book has left me bemused. At the start I loved Marguerite as a character, her enthusiasm and fresh eyes seeing everything. However, as the story progressed and she became jaded, we seemed to skim huge periods of her life. Suddenly 8 years have passed, or 10. Suddenly a 20 year relationship has ended when I thought it was only about half as long as that. In trying to cover so much ground it is inevitable that periods of uneventful time will pass unexplored, but I really struggled to work out where exactly in time we were sometimes. World events were useful markers but not every moment was set against something I could identify in that way!

Marguerite herself was an oddity: backwards and forwards with her attitude to politics, activism and loved ones, as she aged she became less defined as a character. I have no idea of this was a conscious choice but if it was I am not sure if it signifies her loss of status/relevance in the world or the fact that as people age, our social recognition of them changes.

This is why I really enjoyed the start of the book but I got frustrated later into it: from focus descriptions of the world around her, as time passes we experience less of Marguerite’s reality. For example, one of her closest friends dies from AIDS (which was clearly foreshadowed), but from diagnosis to death covered about 3 pages of very superficial detail. It was as though the earlier chapters were spared the degree of editing applied later, and they were better for it.

I also found the odd style of flashbacks a little off-putting at first but I understood them more as the story went on and I think they work, in retrospect.

Overall, I think I need time to digest this one. I wanted to enjoy it more than I did; I’m not sure I’d want to re-read it based on my gut reaction. There was a little ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ feel to the end which was out of keeping with Marguerite’s frustrating experiences to that point, but helped tie up a few loose ends and gave ‘Miss Carter’ a more fitting tribute than the ones strewn throughout the book. Still, the book was missing something for me. Maybe this is one of those occasions were a longer book would have been more satisfying: the Marguerite of 1948 certainly deserved it, so there’s no reason why the Marguerite of 2003 wouldn’t.

If you’ve read this book – let me know what you think.  Is it one I’ll suddenly get in a few days time or is it just too big a brief to fill?

Happy reading,
EJ
🙂