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Indifferent Heroes (1985)

di Mary Hocking

Serie: Good Daughters (book 2)

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593439,574 (3.88)48
In this fascinating and eventful second part of Mary Hocking's trilogy we discover what happens to the Fairley family and their friends, both young and old, once war has broken out. While some remain in England, enduring the fear and austerities of the Home Front, others, including the middle sister, Alice, are posted abroad to still harsher trials and temptations. Using many of her own wartime experiences, Mary Hocking moves from the infamous Burma railroad to London, from Egypt to the Sussex countryside and, with characteristic sympathy and clarity, shows a world torn apart by war.… (altro)
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Now we follow the experiences of the Fairley family, the daughters and parents and friends into and through the war.

One of Hocking's gifts is to switch easily and clearly from one mind to another in this close third person narrative, even in the same paragraph there can be a switch and only once or twice have I needed to stop and check. This is because the way each character thinks and perceives the world is sufficiently different to be distinguishable. Louise, the eldest daughter, lives through her senses and emotions; Alice tends to stand back and watch; Claire, with the most nervous disposition, tends to either panic or intellectualize - she's the 'smartest' but also the least reliable and most difficult of the three. Hocking doesn't judge at all, but approaches these three women and their differing ways of apprehending and being in the world with such clear eyes and so much compassion without turning sappy. We also follow the parents' experiences, I have become very very attached to Judith, the girls' mother, and will simply say, I am so happy for her capacity for happiness! There is Ben, another of my favorites, who enlists as a soldier and becomes a pow of the Japanese. I can't think what I've read, but I have some vivid memories of scenes from some novel or other about this, and Hocking does an excellent job conveying the isolated hopelessness and futility of it.

An aside, having read Coventry I was fascinated by the scene in which Alice and friend are driven by a mad Major through the burning city - it's a still point in the novel, a core around which everything else turns, I think. One of the themes of the book, emerging more strongly now, is about.... steadfastness? I suppose you could trivialize it to the 'keep calm and carry on' theme, so weirdly popular nowadays, but it goes a lot deeper than that here.

Certainly I am curious how everyone will adjust to the post-war period - even the usually light Angela Thirkell's novels had an exhausted aura about them during this time - a let-down, but with so many things still not available, housing shortages, endless rationing, damaged soldiers emotionally and physically to care for - no respite - but the messy business of recuperation. ****1/2 ( )
6 vota sibylline | Jan 28, 2014 |
indifferentheroes

All Virago/All August continues with another Mary Hocking novel – mine isn’t a Virago copy although I do really like the Abacus editions. I read Good Daughters, the first book in this family trilogy at the beginning of August and loved it. It is really hard to review the novels of this Hocking trilogy because I know a lot of people are reading them at the moment or intending to, and I don’t want to spoil them for people, and I don’t know how interesting a blog post about a second instalment of a series is, when you haven’t read the first one. Oh well here goes.

At the opening of this second book in Mary Hocking’s Fairley family trilogy, it is 1939, and Alice, the middle daughter has newly joined the Wrens. She has previously suffered a breakdown following the events at the conclusion of Good Daughters, but is now excited to be going out into the world. Her elder sister, married to Guy, is now the mother to two young children, while Claire is coming to the end of her school days. The outbreak of war gives Stanley Fairley an excuse to re-tell the stories of his own service during the Great War – and turn his attention to more practical matters like the clearing of the loft, and helping out his increasingly hopeless neighbour Mrs Vaseyelin. Guy has also joined up – and is already abroad, while the sister’s cousin, Ben initially takes his time to join up – but does so, irritated at the interruption to his career at the bar.

“There was not much to laugh about during the next two days. Enormous seas built up. Even the crew was sick. Worse than this, submarines had wreaked havoc on a previous convoy and soon the ships were steaming through a sea laden with wreckage that at times it seemed they were making their way amid the ruins of a sunken city. It was only too easy to hear the cries of drowned men in the howling wind. Ben had not tasted fear until now. In an emergency, the crew would be at their posts. The men on draft were cargo.”

Alice soon finds herself in Egypt, where she embarks on her first romance, and is both impressed and surprised by the sophisticated worldliness of her fellow Wrens – who indulge in casual love affairs with ease. Back in London Angus Drummond is involved with some kind of secret war work – and begins a relationship with Irene one of Alice’s friends. Daphne Drummond – of whose family relationships Alice still has very uneasy feelings – has a brief fling with Ben before he too goes abroad, with the absence of Alice, Daphne and Louise are thrown together. Louise is lonely, a young woman with two small children, she is not the type to throw herself into good works, and there are plenty of temptations for an attractive young woman who hasn’t seen her husband in a long time. Louise’s behaviour makes her difficult to sympathise with – although she isn’t totally reprehensible, she is a silly weak girl, and the Fairley sister I like the least, I will be interested to see if she redeems herself further in the third novel.
One of my favourite characters from Good Daughters Jacov Vaseyelin shows up too, even running into Alice in Egypt as part of a touring company – his is a calm, philosophical attitude to the tragedies that the war has brought to his and his friends’ doors.

Mary Hocking gives her readers a faithful and realistic portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times. Fear and confusion, loneliness and unexpected deaths, Hocking doesn’t just show us the frustrations of rationing, the jolly camaraderie of shelter life. Instead we have the horror of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the feeling of homelessness that follows a bombing, the desolation of a railway siding during the blackout – the glamour of a Wrens uniform and the strangeness of new found freedom. Born in 1921, Mary Hocking herself would have lived through these times as a young woman and in fact she served in the meteorology branch of Fleet Air Arm during the war.

These are characters I have come to really like, some of them are flawed, but I am certainly looking forward to finding out what happens to them all next. ( )
1 vota Heaven-Ali | Aug 29, 2013 |
Indifferent Heroes by Mary Hocking; (4 1/2*)

In this, the second of the Hocking WWII trilogy, the storyline moves from the Fairley family to particular members of the family and how their lives change & how they deal with those changes throughout the War. The story is told mainly through the lives of the eldest daughter, Louise & the middle daughter, Alice.
Louise is now married & the mother of two, whose husband is off to war. The time in interminable for her and she needs diversion. Not for her the war-time volunteer work nor church work that seems to keep her now widowed mother, Judith sane and busy.
The middle daughter, Alice has joined the Wrens and is occupied with travels to far off places where she is needed for the war-effort. She seems to not quite fit in with the other girls who are more free with their favors but seems to spend most of her free time pondering her life, her future and her friendships. She falls in love with a man who is gone to war also and much of her time is taken up with letters to him.
There is not a whole lot about Claire, the youngest of the three daughters, in this book. She still appears to me to be the spoiled darling of her youth and not grown up at all.
I enjoyed this book a great deal, just not quite as much as the first of the trilogy. ( )
3 vota rainpebble | Aug 10, 2013 |
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In this fascinating and eventful second part of Mary Hocking's trilogy we discover what happens to the Fairley family and their friends, both young and old, once war has broken out. While some remain in England, enduring the fear and austerities of the Home Front, others, including the middle sister, Alice, are posted abroad to still harsher trials and temptations. Using many of her own wartime experiences, Mary Hocking moves from the infamous Burma railroad to London, from Egypt to the Sussex countryside and, with characteristic sympathy and clarity, shows a world torn apart by war.

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