“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.
