“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings,” observed the art critic Robert Hughes in his landmark 1980 book The Shock of the New. That cataclysmic phenomenon is captured with haunting dexterity by the screenwriter Alice Winn in her debut novel. In Memoriam is at once epic and intimate, humorous and profound, a vivid rendering of the madness and legacy of the first world war as seen through the lens of a schoolboy love affair.
The story starts in school – specifically (and it’s evoked with such specificity, the reader can almost smell it) Preshute, a fictitious establishment that nevertheless owes something to Marlborough College, where Winn herself was educated. It’s June 1914, and war is still a game that the boys play in the woods, their heroics fuelled by epic poetry and history lessons.
Throughout, Winn inserts extracts from the school newspaper, the Preshutian, which is how we learn that the debating society has been discussing the motion “In the opinion of the House, war is a necessary evil”. Opposing it is Henry Gaunt, a tall fellow, awkward even by the standards of his peers (he can barely communicate with his twin sister), who has boxed his way to respect among his classmates but is tortured by intense, forbidden feelings for his best friend, Sidney Ellwood.
Charming, glamorous, Tennyson-quoting Ellwood feels the same way about Gaunt, though their banter prevents them from confessing their “abnormalities” to each other. Both have more to hide besides their latent sexuality, and as anti-German feelings rise, Gaunt, who has just turned 18, is compelled by his Prussian aristocrat mother to enlist. Ellwood soon follows, his arrival in the trenches sparking rage in his horrified friend. As Ellwood himself soon realises, his “useless, incomprehensible eloquence” has no place there.
In Memoriam acknowledges some of the period’s best-known sources. Ellwood is partly inspired by Siegfried Sassoon, for instance, while the ghosts of the young men Vera Brittain lost never feel far away. This is the conflict depicted from a 21st-century perspective, however; the novel’s increasingly pacifist protagonists certainly have no time for Rupert Brooke’s “bone-chillingly soppy” verse.
Although Winn is interested in what war does to the self and to abstract notions of beauty, bravery and home, she doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the frontline. She takes the reader into battle at Loos and at the Somme, matter-of-factly describing the butchery that leaves soldiers literally spilling their guts. Eventually, the simple word “red” is used to signify unending horror. “It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children,” Ellwood notes, still just a teenager himself.
At heart, In Memoriam is a love story, but one with an adventure woven through it. Acts of revenge, moonlit escapes from POW camps, serendipities just wild enough to be credible – all bound from the page with a clarity best described as cinematic, while even in the direst moments Winn’s dialogue thrums with mirth and furious intelligence. Throughout, she artfully switches perspectives and settings, leaving the reader in desperate suspense over fates and fortunes.
The book’s title alludes not only to a poem by Tennyson, but to the obituaries column in the Preshutian – and it’s with this roll call of the dead that In Memoriam closes. It’s a testament to Winn’s storytelling prowess that by then, the plainest of language – name, rank, age – serves to convey an entire life and all that it might have been filled with had it not been cut so senselessly short.
• In Memoriam by Alice Winn is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
