Before the war
The author of the bestselling Maisie Dobbs mystery series (10 novels in all), Jacqueline Winspear, returns to her preferred historical period of World War I with her first stand-alone novel, “The Care and Management of Lies.” Instead of setting the narrative during the aftermath of the Great War, Winspear begins her story in June 1914, a month before its bloody outbreak.
“People — country people — would reflect on this time and remember cricket on the village green, with ladies seated, drinking tea, while men and boys ambled back and forth between the stumps,” she writes in the opening chapter, “the ricochet of leather on willow accompanying a run here, a spring there, followed by light applause from members of the audience not already lulled into an afternoon doze on the pavilion veranda.”
Swiftly Winspear sharpens her narrative lens onto the familiar, yet uneasy, friendship between two young women — Kezia Marchant and Dorothy Brissenden, both 27 years old and on the cusp of new things. The women met during their adolescent years when they were students at the Camden School for Girls in Tunbridge Wells. Beyond a passion for literature and intellectual pursuits, the two characters share a modest background: Dorrit (who decides to change her Dickensian name to the more sophisticated “Thea”) is the tomboy daughter of a farmer, and Kezia grew up with a father who serves as a small-town vicar.
Despite these intersecting values and interests, Kezia and Thea’s lives follow disparate trajectories: Kezia is swept into the undertow of domestic responsibilities after marrying Thea’s younger brother, Tom, who has inherited the family farm; and Thea is drawn to the zeal of the suffrage movement. As an unspoken barb to Kezia, Thea gives her “The Woman’s Book,” a 1911 tome outlining all of the traditional duties of a wife, as a wedding gift. (In an interview, Winspear explains that this domestic manual supplied part of the inspiration of this novel when she discovered a copy when she was working at a friend’s stall in London’s Portobello Road Market.)
Far from being a natural in the kitchen, Kezia attempts to throw herself headlong into mastering new and adventurous recipes. One day Tom returns home with four fresh lambs’ kidneys. “In truth, she did not even want to touch them, did not want to finger the smooth flesh, blood oozing out onto the plate,” writes Winspear. “It had pooled almost to the edge of the china, and already she could see a mark forming as the blood began to dry and congeal, working its way back to the kidneys as if it were an outgoing tide.”
The Great War and other perilous turns of events quickly redefine the two women and their daily existences: Both Tom and Thea — Tom as a private and Thea trains to become an ambulance driver — go off to the front lines while Kezia manages the farm. Told in a close third-person point of view, Winspear adeptly rotates the story amid the cast of primary characters: Kezia, Thea, Tom, Edmund Hawkes (an aristocrat neighbor and Tom’s captain), Sergeant Knowles and Reverend Marchant, Kezia’s father.
Letters and diary entries penned by the various characters propel this suspenseful wartime narrative forward. The epistolary exchange between Tom and Kezia offers much of the authentic heart of the story, with Kezia writing in elaborate details of imaginary meals that she would like to cook for her enlisted husband. One example includes roasted duck stuffed with preserved plums, rosemary and sliced almonds. Given the tasteless grub of the mess hall, Tom reads selected entries of his wife’s letters to his fellow soldiers. These scenes and Kezia’s letters render some of the most memorable moments, speaking to the transformative nature of food and cooking — and all it can bring during trying times.
There are a few missteps in the novel with the caricaturelike villain of Sgt. Knowles, who persistently taunts Tom throughout his active duty with little personal motivation, and fleeting moments of exposition-heavy prose that flatten this otherwise captivating narrative. Ultimately, it is in Kezia’s imagination and kitchen where this tragic story of war, passion, love and friendship comes alive. Winspear illustrates how food — whether it’s imaginary or real — can provide the perfect amount of tenderness and compassion when it’s needed the most.