📖 Book Review ~ Lucia's War by Susan Lanigan

  

Idee Fixe Press
2020

My thanks to the author for my copy of this book

London, 1950. Soprano Lucia Percival has overcome racism and many obstacles to become a renowned opera singer. She is now due to perform her last concert. But she has no intention of going onstage. A terrible secret from her service during the First World War has finally caught up with her.

London, 1917. Lucia, a young Jamaican exile, hopes to make it as a musician. But she is haunted by a tragic separation that is still fresh in her memory – and when she meets Lilian, an old woman damaged by a similar wartime loss, she agrees to a pact that could destroy everything she has fought so hard to achieve.

From the Western Front and the mean streets of Glasgow, to black society in London, Lucia’s story tells a tale of music, motherhood, loss and redemption.

📖 My Thoughts..

The early part of the twentieth century was largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events of the First World War and for Jamaican Lucia Percival life is going to turn out very differently from what she expected. Being part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, Lucia works as a VAD during some of the worst conflicts of the war, memories of will which never leave her and which shape her destiny. During the early part of this troubled century living life as a black woman was difficult as racism was neither covert nor undisclosed, and whilst Lucia suffered this ghastly prejudice with stoicism and a considered resignation it didn't make it any easier to bear nor excused its narrow-mindedness. 

We pick up the story in a dual time frame, that of 1917 when Lucia finds herself living in London, and later in 1950 when Lucia is a very different woman but one who has carried her secrets close and whose vulnerability continues to dominate. Lucia has a sublime gift for music, and singing, and it is this gift which will cut through her defenses and allow her to succeed in a world where to be both female, and black, was practically a none starter. 

Whilst this story highlights this struggle to succeed, it also takes us back, through Lucia's thoughtful narration, to the events which have brought her to this place and time and by cleverly inserting some Jamaican patois Lucia comes alive in our imagination and the author's thoughtful storytelling allows us to follow every step of her journey. Lucia's War may start during the early part of the twentieth century but as the story moves on it becomes obvious that perhaps, for this brave and stalwart woman Lucia's own personal war never truly ends.

Rich in history, imaginatively written, and with a strong sense of the social and prejudicial injustices which were rife at this time, Lucia's War is another thought provoking novel from this talented writer.

About the Author

Susan Lanigan graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English and History in the late 90s, then pursued a Graduate Diploma in I.T. in Dublin City University and a Masters in Writing in NUI Galway.

Her first novel White Feathers, a tale of passion, betrayal and war, was selected as one of the final ten in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, 2013, and published in 2014 by Brandon Books. The book won critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the UK Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2015.

Her second novel, Lucia’s War, also concerning WWI as well as race, music and motherhood, was published in June 2020 and has been named as the Coffee Pot Book Club Honourable Mention in the Modern Historical Book of the Year Award.

Twitter @susanl_lanigan #LuciasWar

📖 Book Review ~ Unfortunate Stars by Susan Lanigan

Idee Fixe Press
February 2021
(45 pages)
Available as an ebook and audio book

My thanks to the author for my copy of the ebook

Czechoslovakia, 1938 - Friedrich Pflommer, a married man with two children, has fallen hopelessly in love with the most unsuitable person possible - the young, volatile Kai, an exchange student living under his own roof. As Nazi forces gather on the border, Friedrich is playing a high-stakes game and risks losing everything.

France, 1915 - as a young lieutenant in wartime, Friedrich is badly injured during a failed counterattack, but a meeting with an Englishman during battle changes everything.

Unfortunate Stars is a short story of romantic love and deep friendship between men, of what it is to surrender to our own truth, and to live it even in the hardest of circumstances.

 📖 My thoughts..

Unfortunate Stars is made all the more tender by the author's perceptiveness in placing the reader right at the very heart of the intimacy and in doing so makes the story all the more powerful in its simplicity.

Friedrich Pflommer has much to lose if his clandestine relationship with Kai, an exchange student who is living with the Pflommer family, is discovered. However, as we get deeper into this forbidden intimacy so Friederich starts to reveal more about himself, especially of his heartbreaking relationship with a young Englishman during the catastrophic events of the First World War.

Whilst the story may be short it doesn't lessen its impact or spoil the effect of the notion that love is love wherever the arrow falls and in whatever circumstances it finds itself in. Beautifully written, and researched, Unfortunate Stars is a good introduction to this talented author's work.

About the Author

Susan Lanigan graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English and History in the late 90s, then pursued a Graduate Diploma in I.T. in Dublin City University and a Masters in Writing in NUI Galway.

Her first novel White Feathers, a tale of passion, betrayal and war, was selected as one of the final ten in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, 2013, and published in 2014 by Brandon Books. The book won critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the UK Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2015.

Her second novel, Lucia’s War, also concerning WWI as well as race, music and motherhood, was published in June 2020 and has been named as the Coffee Pot Book Club Honourable Mention in the Modern Historical Book of the Year Award.

Twitter @susanl_lanigan

Sunday WW1 Remembered....Guest Author, Susan Lanigan

As part of my ongoing tribute during this centenary of WW1, I am delighted to feature the work of some excellent authors who have written novels set during The Great War

I am delighted to welcome the author of White Feathers


Susan Lanigan

White Feathers – a Problem For Feminists?

“She shouldn’t have done it.”

That was the point-blank reaction of my “Finish Your Novel” course tutor when I told him the plot of my book. Specifically, his reaction to hearing about the terrible choice protagonist Eva is forced to make when war breaks out and Christopher, the man she loves, refuses to enlist. Her stepsister Grace is very critical of his behaviour and insists that Eva present him with a white feather – a symbol of his cowardice intended to force him to join the war effort.

That Eva’s back is against the wall, that she genuinely feels her blood sister’s life is at stake: all this did not alter my tutor’s opinion one jot. His reaction was immediate. And to my mind understandable. His empathy was with the men who were shamed into fighting a war they wanted no part of.

Mutatis mutandis, let us turn to Downton Abbey, where a gaggle of women bearing white feathers show up at an event and get turned away by an angry Lord Grantham. Not before Branson, the Irish chauffeur, brandishes a few, remarking cheerfully “I got loads.” Haha, all a bit of a joke, really.

Presentist nonsense. The white feather was no joke. It could often be a death warrant.

When I first started researching, I came across Francis Beckett’s account of what happened to his grandfather:

He had three small daughters, which saved him from conscription…But in 1916, as he walked home to south London from his office, a woman gave him a white feather…He enlisted the next day. By that time, they cared nothing for short sight. They just wanted a body to stop a shell, which Rifleman James Cutmore duly did in February 1918, dying of his wounds on March 28. (Source)

Ninety years later, Beckett, seething with anger, details exactly what effect that strange woman’s action had on his family: the prolonged death of his grandfather and the anguish of his mother’s recollections towards the end of her life. It was clear he had forgiven nothing.

As I worked on the storylines of Eva, caught in the middle of a nasty family struggle, and Christopher, resolved to keep a promise to his beloved older brother, I came across other real life accounts. An English friend told me of a woman who came to speak at her school, a descendant of a family of devout Quakers. One of her ancestors was a young man whose fiancée had no truck with his stance as a conscientious objector and shamed him with a white feather. He went to the Front, refused to take up arms against his fellow man, and was immediately killed in battle. Again, the speaker made it clear that her family had never forgiven the fiancée.

So who were they, the women who did this? Women who would never be compelled to take up arms acting with such destructive malice against men of principle? 

The answer is complex because it covers a poisonous intersection between the early feminist movement and government-backed propaganda. The women who gave white feathers were both suffragettes and anti-suffragettes. The Active Service League, co-founded by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald and the prominent anti-feminist Mrs Humphry Ward, were in full accord with the main suffragist organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union, on this matter. In the scene featuring Mrs Ward in the book, she praises Emmeline Pankhurst for organising her followers in a mass white-feathering session outside the Opera House on September 8th, 1914. I am able to provide a precise date for this event because it actually happened.

This legacy is awkward for feminists. In a review of a book by Kate Adie in the Guardian in 2013, the reviewer mentions that Adie considers the white feather movement “a landmark event in women’s liberation”, quoting the veteran war reporter as saying “The government actually addressed them directly for the first time, asking them to send their sons and their husbands to war. This moved women's status up a notch.” (Source)

Ooof. Respect to Kate Adie for her war journalism but…that’s ugly.

I get it that women were disenfranchised, had no rights and were treated as men’s property. When Eva’s friend Sybil receives a letter from her husband seeking a divorce, she is rightly anxious about her future status even though she has no affection for the man. It is also true that women were manipulated by the Asquith government – the relentless bombardment of posters with slogans saying “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” and “Women of England, is Your Best Boy Wearing Khaki?” is insidious, a slow drip-drip-drip of erosion of trust and confidence in their men. I also know from reading Rilla of Ingleside how strong feeling was against of anyone of a pacifist bent. From my vantage point in 2014 it horrified me to read such opinions as those expressed by Rilla and her family, but I cannot gainsay them.

All that said, I don’t think the heartbreaking situation that couples like Eva and Christopher had to face moved anyone’s “status up a notch”. I see no liberation in it. I see nothing positive in it at all.

“She shouldn’t have done it,” my tutor said. And Eva would fully agree with him.

Two lives in danger - her lover's and her sister's. But she must choose only one.

In 1913, young Irish emigrant Eva Downey is trapped in London with a remote father and hostile stepmother. When she is awarded a legacy from an old suffragette to attend a finishing school in Kent, she jumps at the chance. At the school, she finds kinship and later falls in love with her teacher Christopher Shandlin, her intellectual equal.

But when war breaks out and the man she loves refuses to fight, Eva's fanatical stepsister Grace pushes her to make a choice. She must present him with a white feather of cowardice, or no money will be given for her sister Imelda's life-saving treatment in Switzerland. Caught in a dilemma, Eva must choose - and her decision will have irrevocable consequences for her and Christopher and haunt her for the rest of her life.

My review of White Feathers can be found here.

About the Author

Visit the author's Website

Follow on Twitter @susan_lanigan

Amazon UK

Huge thanks to Susan for giving such an insight into the symbolic use of White Feathers during the First World War.

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