Charlotte Sometimes

"She’s written a number of novels, mostly children’s novels, but this is the one that she’s best known for. This is partly because it is the title of The Cure’s sixth single, which is a take on the story in this book. To call this an underrated existentialist classic might be a little bit of a stretch, because I don’t think that it is presenting a theory, or the theory that existence precedes essence, or anything like that. But it is a meditation on the kinds of questions, and the kinds of reasons, why people might come to that theory. I’m reluctant to give anything away. The book was first published in 1969, but was set in 1958 and 1918, moving between the end of the First World War and a period forty years later. The central character, Charlotte Makepeace, comes to understand the role of her social setting and the temporal sequence of her life in forming who she is, in a way that wouldn’t have been obvious to her, had she not been through the adventures that she’s gone through. I don’t know. There was a lot of literature around at the time that was influenced by existentialism in various ways, though it tended to have been influenced by the Camus model of a lone alienated figure rather than this socially-embedded existentialism that you get in the works of Beauvoir. I have read an interview with the author where she says she was surprised that a lot of people consider it a book about identity, because that’s not what she had in mind when she was writing it. But I’m not sure really what that amounts to, because people mean different things by ‘identity’. I think it’s clearly a meditation on what makes a person who they are, the historical contingencies of that, the people you’re around, the larger historical context, and the navigation of all that is available to you at your particular stage of life. As I mentioned, one part of the story is at the end of the First World War, a major shock to European culture, and then the other part of the novel is 40 years later. Not only is the First World War well and truly over, but we’ve seen its ramifications in the Second World War as well by then. I would recommend it for adults, yes. I think I would recommend it as a children’s book as well. Perhaps it sounds a little sophisticated, but the lead character is ten years old and the story is told entirely from her perspective. The way in which a reading of this book might cause you to come to question your own identity, and see your personality as a reflection of the contingencies of your background and upbringing, is perhaps the kind of realisation you wouldn’t want children to have too early in their lives. But it is certainly something to recommend to teenagers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. It’s about the construction of race itself. It’s the latter for sure. One of the reasons why people are becoming interested again in existentialism is that there’s been a resurgence of interest in identity and in the origins of identity , especially gender and racial identity. This is why there’s a resurgence of interest in Beauvoir and Fanon. I absolutely think their analyses of the way sedimentation occurs, and of the prospects for a person moving away from a sedimented outlook, speak very directly to contemporary concerns. The other books I’ve recommended are relevant to these concerns too, just less directly."

"This book is the first war book I read and it made a deep impression on me. I read it when I was about nine or ten. It’s a book for children , published in 1969. The Charlotte of the title is a twelve year old girl who goes to boarding school and goes to sleep in a dormitory in a bed which has a funny set of wheels on it, and wakes up fifty years earlier in 1918. She has swapped places with a girl called Clare, who in 1918 was sleeping in the same bed. We don’t hear from Clare’s point of view, what she makes of 1969 or 1968, but we do hear about Charlotte, who finds herself in the final year of the First World War . They swap backwards and forwards night after night. The plot twist is that Charlotte gets stuck in 1918. She and her younger sister are evacuated to a house where the son has gone to war thinking it was going to be a fantastic military heroic adventure, and it turns out it wasn’t. They play with his toy soldiers and the family hold a séance. It made a huge impression on me because Penelope Farmer has this incredibly deft way of making you get a sense of the shock Arthur feels on going to war and finding it was nothing like his toy soldiers and his ideas of bravery. There is another poignant moment surrounding a teacher in the 1918 school called Miss Wilkins. She’s very bright—a little bit plump, she’s sort of birdy and beady—and Charlotte likes her very much. When she eventually gets back to her own time there’s a Miss Wilkins who’s white haired and a different person altogether, her fiancé died in the First World War. It’s a way of showing how, without being graphic in the slightest, this enormous worldwide conflict had very personal consequences. I think it’s an extraordinary novel and a very thought-provoking one, with many interesting details for children to use to think about war. You don’t want to overwhelm children with the seriousness and magnitude of war, but on the other hand there are children who have no choice but to live through war. The children who are told about it are the lucky ones. But I think doing it in this way, having details of the home front, makes it extremely vivid. There are other fantastic war books for children. Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden is another good example. That also involves an evacuation. It is dear to my heart because my dad was an evacuee. That sense of the impact of war on children comes across very convincingly, very vividly. One of the strange things about war is that when we’re in one, we don’t know when it’s going to end or indeed if it’s going to end. And this was very pronounced in the First World War, so people like Vera Brittain, who wrote Testament of Youth —which is another amazing war book—said, I think it may never end, I just don’t see any coming out of this. That’s quite difficult to portray in narrative. Many war novels will try to do something strange to the narrative to keep open more than one temporal perspective. Ian McEwan’s Atonement does it, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five does it, this book does it. They create the sense that there can be more than one ending, and we don’t know which ending’s actually going to happen. This mirrors the awful experience people had of getting those telegrams saying “missing in action” when you didn’t know whether they are alive or dead, sometimes for years, and just had to live in that terrible state of uncertainty."