Songs of love and war unfold in a German PoW camp
The scene: one man — a softspoken RAF pilot in training, specifically — in a Bavarian PoW camp filled with 2,000 other male prisoners circa 1940. What happens next?
A plan of escape with astronomical odds for success? An equally dangerous rescue attempt? A tense contest (Allies vs. Axis) of wills? Terrible brutality and carnage?
For anyone reared on the pervasive cinematic tropes of the Second World War — whether Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy amorality in Inglourious Basterds or Steven Spielberg’s high-mindedness in Saving Private Ryan — each of these answers makes sense. After all, war stories are always about heroic efforts and deadly conflict, right? How about dutiful note-taking while observing a family of nesting redstarts? Birdwatching: yes, that’s the answer initially proposed by Helen Humphreys in The Evening Chorus.
You might, like me, think there’s no hobby less interesting than gawking at a bird as it sits on a tree branch. And, like me, your prejudice might encourage you to doubt The Evening Chorus, with its pretty cover featuring a sparrow-like creature resting on a strand of barbed wire. Just as I was, though, your snap judgment would be wrong, egregiously so.
Absorbing, richly characterized, and marked by smart, delightful twists and turns, the novel’s fruitful visitation of war and its aftermath never fails to captivate. If there is such a thing as a cultural vocabulary of war, Humphreys adds welcome new words to it.
In “Redstart,” the novel’s opening chapter, Humphreys introduces solitary James Hunter, known as the Birdman, and “the arithmetic of the camp.”
Imprisoned and louse-bitten but protected, more or less, by the Geneva Conventions, the men get by. Some of them fight for escape (and try but fail with tunnelling). The rest, like James, are resigned to an uncertain fate.
Aware of wire fencing that cannot be crossed for any reason and mind-numbing boredom, the captives get creative: debates, theatrical performances, reading, makeshift golf, and gardening. Spotting a bird family outside the fence, James, a teacher in England, focuses on study. Besides giving him clear purpose, he believes (as he indicates in descriptive letters to his wife Rose in England) that immersion in the natural world, one of his commonalities with her, will keep the new marriage vital.
Though camp scenes are often fraternal and leisurely (James also forms a complicated friendship with the camp’s Kommandant, a former university professor named Christoph), Humphreys reminds readers of both the deprivation and the heightened emotions of war, as when a prisoner whose whistling irritates a guard is shot dead. A sudden forced march concludes the atmospheric chapter.
With that fraught development, Humphreys crosses the Channel, switching her attention to the routines of Rose and James’ sister Enid, which are of course regulated by war.
In a cramped rural cottage facing Ashdown Forest, a former hunting park for Henry VIII, Rose tends to chickens, a Victory Garden and her new dog. Loyal, she nightly volunteers for the war effort; the hours are long and introspective. But with the strangely freeing solitude and the reality of her husband growing dim, doubt about their bond’s legitimacy grows. A handsome soldier stationed nearby doesn’t help matters.
Evacuating a bombed-out flat in London, meanwhile, Enid’s also fleeing scandal: an affair with a married fellow, who died in her company, during an air raid.
As depicted by Humphreys, the resulting stay with Rose (the women are barely acquainted) is heavy with tension and deceit as well as bright with tentative friendship. Undisclosed private affairs draw the women together but simultaneously hold them apart.
About two- thirds through, Humphreys shifts to 1950, and in the concluding set of five pageturning chapters she surveys the radically altered lives of characters in England and Germany.
From alcoholism, domestic misery and a suicidal resolve to a touching but top secret samesex romance, the characters are beset with a host of less-thanideal circumstances resulting from moments experienced and decisions acted upon a decade earlier. The dim postwar days of Rose and James in particular are directly shaped by the separation that began in 1940.
In highlighting the wondrous (if at times vexing) unknowability of our lives — that a sudden impulsive idea, or a decision to turn left instead of right, can usher in unforeseeable consequences — The Evening Chorus artfully imagines how that might play out for one quartet. And with her usual faultless eloquence, Helen Humphreys makes our witnessing of their causes and effects memorably instructive.
Absorbing, richly characterized, and marked by smart, delightful twists and turns, the novel’s fruitful visitation of war and its after math never fails to captivate.