tamaranth | 2026/054: Zennor in Darkness

2026/054: Zennor in Darkness — Helen Dunmore

... he will cry out against Frieda if she dances in the wind with her scarf flying above her like a banner. She dances for pure joy, but the war does not recognize that kind of dancing. It knows that she’s twirling her scarf in a prearranged signal to the U-boats lying out offshore, waiting. [p.128]

This was Helen Dunmore's first novel, and some of her tropes and traits are visible: sexual tension within the family, arresting images of the natural world, the inexorable force of gossip and rumour. The setting is Cornwall in 1917, a village near Zennor: D H Lawrence and his German wife Frieda have taken a cottage there, and Lawrence is trying to farm, and to maintain his anti-war stance.

The focal character, though, is Clare Coyne, only daughter of Francis Coyne: she keeps house for her widowed father, paints illustrations for his book on wild flowers, and spends what time she can spare with her friends Hannah and Peggy. As the novel opens, the three girls are eagerly awaiting the return of John William, Hannah's brother and Clare's cousin, who's on leave from the trenches because he's going to be made an officer. Clare is secretly in love with John William.

The novel moves between viewpoints, predominantly Clare, Francis Coyne (a prurient man who, unknown to his daughter, is having an affair with a local woman, and also keeps thinking about Hannah and her Sam making love on the beach), Lawrence himself, and Frieda. Lawrence is a keen observer of the natural world. He meets Clare when she's out sketching plants, and introduces her to Frieda in the hope that the two will befriend and support one another. But after John William has been and gone, everything changes.

A novel about women, and men, in wartime, and how war warps and wrecks everything. Lawrence's Utopian schemes, Clare's hopes -- and the hopes of a million girls like her -- of marriage, Frieda's loneliness and anger, John William's despair at the slaughter. I really disliked Francis Coyne by the end of this novel: I felt very sorry for Frieda (whose cousin, I learnt, was the Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richthofen) and I admired Clare's intelligence, composure and passion.

Dunmore's prose is a delight, full of surprising imagery ('larks scream as though they had thrown themselves against the sky and stuck there'): I knew her slightly, a friend of a friend, and wish she had lived longer and written more.