The Beauty and the Sorrow

"This is a very recent book – it came out towards the end of 2011. He has uncovered and found out about the lives of 20 different people from different parts of the world – some are combatants, one is a doctor, there’s this cast of characters – and he narrates the war chronologically through their experiences of particular days. This gives a real sense both of people being at the mercy of history – they’re not major actors in what’s going on – but they’re also completely shaping our view of what’s going on. I should say also that each person’s experiences are narrated with novelist-like techniques. The prose is very like that which we encounter in fiction. He also quotes a lot from their diaries. But then quite an interesting thing happens. We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War , and there are certain events that are obviously key. But one of the interesting things about this book, and perhaps one of its shortcomings, is that for us the absolutely key day of the First World War is the 1st of July 1916 – the first day of the Somme, 60,000 casualties – and in the context of this narrative it never happens, because coincidentally none of the people he’s chosen are there. It reconfigures the history of the First World War – it’s subtitled “An Intimate History” – and we’re very much at the mercy of these people’s experiences, but I think there is this slight problem with it. It reminds me of those documentaries called things like “The Second World War in Colour”. Let’s take a series like “The World at War”, where you have the argument and then people will find the footage to illustrate the argument, the narrative. But when you’re doing a programme like “The Second World War in Colour”, the nature of the war is determined completely by what colour footage is available. Not surprisingly, therefore, since a lot of the Pacific war is filmed in colour by the Americans, that gets rather more emphasis. And some events completely drop out of history, because they’re not in colour. Indeed, that’s right. And there’s a lot of suspense to it as well, because we know the main narrative of the war – which is basically that Germany loses and Britain wins – but within that big narrative people’s individual experiences can often have no relation to it at all. I admire that aspect to it, but what I also admire is the way in which it’s not a novel. We can imagine that if it had been a novel, we’re quite familiar with this device where there are maybe six different narrative voices, they’re completely dispersed – one person is in Mesopotamia, the other is in the Arctic – and as the novel goes on we know that these disparate characters and different voices are all at some point going to converge. But that convergence never happens. They remain dispersed, disparate, separate people. It seems to me that it’s not only a new way of doing history, it’s a new way of giving form to people’s lives without relying on the, I find, increasingly weary conventions of novelisation. But in terms of the prose, the visualisation of scenes and the imaginative rendering of documented events, it’s very novelistic."