Love among the ruins

The phrase that gives this book its title is Graham Greene’s:

The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.

Greene was apparently proud of ‘love-charm’: he used it more than once. It seems to me that the most telling part of the full quotation, though, is that ‘unmistakable engine’. Isn’t Greene’s determination to hear those words in the machine noise a token of the way writers appropriate bare reality? The love-charm is crafted by the one it ensorcels.

Lara Feigel’s book is a well-researched, novelistically narrated story of the romantic entanglements of a handful of writers who sort of knew each other, or nearly did, during and after the second world war: Henry Yorke (aka Henry Green), Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Elizabeth Bowen.

The opening section makes the narrative case for their association with some verve, introducing them by plaiting the stories of what happened to each in the course of a single night in London: 26 September 1940.