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The Lie
Helen Dunmore
BOOK REVIEW:
Set during and just after the First World War, The Lie is an enthralling, heart-wrenching novel of love, memory and devastating loss by one of the UK's most acclaimed storytellers. Cornwall, 1920, early spring. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about to step into the unknown. But will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?
A soldier, “clagged in mud from head to foot”, appears at the foot of Daniel Branwell’s bed. It is 1920 and the war is now over. But Frederick, his closest childhood friend, has been making such night-time visitations ever since Daniel failed to rescue him on the French battlefield. In her unnervingly ambiguous new novel, Helen Dunmore presents a haunting that wavers between ghost story and a study of war trauma.
Back in his Cornish hometown, Daniel is not making much of an effort to fit in to normal civilian life. With no family left, he ekes out a marginal existence on the land of a sick, old woman named Mary Pascoe. After she dies, Daniel respects her final wish to be buried in her own garden. Having circumvented a Christian burial – as well as moving himself into her decrepit cottage – Daniel embellishes the lie that Mary is too ill to see anyone. As he becomes preoccupied with his growing attraction to Frederick’s sister Felicia, his lies about Mary are engendering suspicion among the locals.
This simple story is deftly unfurled, but our deeper engagement centres on the vast dread lurking beneath Daniel’s everyday routines. As he sows seeds in the cottage’s vegetable patch, the soil becomes the mud of the battlefield.
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