The Summer Before the War

It's not often that I finish a book, only to return to the beginning to begin rereading it (albeit quickly!) with an eye toward anything I missed the first time around. Helen Simonson's The Summer Before the War is just such a rare book.

On one level, it is the story of the inhabitants of the Rye, a quintessential English village, as they come to terms with this new war - and the new world it ushers in. It is peopled with rich characters and not a few petty rivalries. The Kent family is the heart of the story, with Aunt Agatha and Uncle John and their nephews Daniel and Hugh. Into their midst enters Beatrice Nash, come to town to teach Latin, a proposition which many in the town find downright scandalous. She arrives in Rye in the middle of that last summer when England was "Old England," and when the English, and the upper classes in particular, had every faith that war could be averted. Simonson captures the end of the age as well as those who lived it.

On a deeper level, The Summer Before the War is the story of stigma: the stigma of insufficient patriotism; the stigma of acts that mar an otherwise upstanding reputation; the stigma of loving the wrong person - or loving the right person at the wrong time; the stigma of not being British (or not being British enough). The stigma of being a Gypsy. From war crimes to homosexuality, Simonson handles heavy topics with a deft touch. In fact, her work is so fine that it was not until I'd finished this novel that I realized how consistently this thread runs through the book. Moreover, and like Simonson's last novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Simonson's characters are multi-dimensional and feel entirely real. Their adventures are fun, touching, and highly readable. The relationships that she crafts are a strong point of the story.

I have read many  novels with World War I as the backdrop, and no small number of these British. (The Walnut Tree and Somewhere in France are but two that trade on this setting.) To my mind, though, The Summer Before the War is the richest, most involved, and most emotionally charged of those I have read. From the presence of the Belgian refugees to the emergence of women's rights, Simonson has created a story in which going over the top is only part of the story of England's war.