When No Man’s Land is home

Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war.  How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards the house with the telegram, the local surnames repeated with different initials on the war memorial. All very much in the ‘too sad to think about’ department, particularly if you love Edwardian children’s stories and start contemplating What Happened to Oswald Later.

Helen Dunmore, an assured writer who in a previous novel has forced us to live through the siege of Leningrad with its freezing and starving babies, does not shirk from her task. She really does make us wake up and smell it: mainly the mud. The Lie is a mud-clagged, death-clagged, haunted book, written in the first person in the present tense, and I must say, it stays with you.

It is set in 1920 in Cornwall: a far cry from the horror, you might think; but the novel opens with a terrifying apparition of the narrator Daniel’s childhood best friend Frederick, standing at the end of the bed:

He comes to me, clagged in mud from head to foot.  I can smell the mud. You never forget the reek of it. Thick, almost oily, full of shit and rotten flesh, cordite and chloride of lime.

We think of the No Man’s Land of the first world war as a place of utter desolation; this book shows how that desolation followed the survivors back to England and laid waste to their lives. The homeland to which they return becomes another kind of No Man’s Land.