By Megan Thomas
I’ll be frank with you – when I saw this on the shelf in the charity shop, I was immediately drawn to the title, thinking maybe it was some sort of feminist speculative fiction of a male-free world. Not quite, but I’m glad I let my curiosity get the better of me and picked it up. It’s a quick and powerful read and while I wasn’t always totally convinced by the narrator, it’s a refreshingly unique story.
The story, set in 1916, is told from the perspective of an upper class 16-year-old boy called Vincent, who is just young enough to not be at war. That’s not to say that the war isn’t affecting him and the world in which he now inhabits which, by and large, is absent of men. More than that, though, is the fact that Arthur, the 21-year-old son of one of Vincent’s family’s servants, would likely never have confessed his love to Vincent had it not been for the war.
Across the short novel which is written in a diary-like fashion, the reader is witness to Vincent’s shedding of childhood innocence in more ways that one, which also includes seeing him develop a platonic relationship with a much older gentleman, none other than French novelist and literary critic Marcel Proust, who he spends most afternoons dining with in expensive hotels.
The juxtaposition of what Arthur shares with Vincent from the frontline and the terrors that follow him even when he is lying next to Vincent in bed, compared to the life Vincent and Marcel enjoy when Arthur is at war, is sharp and poignant. Moreover, an astute observation at large on how easily war can be ignored from afar… how life somehow, inexplicably continues in the absence of men at war, even with death in the headlines and German Zeppelins on the skyline.
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