Exclusive interview with author Chris Cleave and a review of his book about love and war in England during WWII
Rating: 3 Stars
Review by Gabrielle Pantera
“I discovered that while their white schoolmates were evacuated to the countryside to save them from the bombing Blitz on London, black children were often kept behind,” says Everybody Brave is Forgiven author Chris Cleave. “Or, returned to the city after failed evacuations, because the countryside didn’t like them. That became my way into the story.”
Cleave’s observations on bigotry, class separation, war and its effect on those serving and left at home are starkly honest, even brutal. The horrors of war are vivid, as though you’re there experiencing the fighting and bombing. Inspired by the wartime love story found in real-life love letters between Chris Cleave’s grandparents, the story is two books in one. It switches between the point of view of the fighting and wartime life in London. The characters are not endearing, just surviving. The story can become confusing when a character is in a drug-induced fog due to war injuries.
The book is mostly set in London between 1939 and 1942. Mary North leaves boarding school to become a part of the war effort. She’s given the unglamorous job of teacher, replacing a male teacher gone off to war. Within days the children are evacuated, and Mary is left behind. She begins dating Tom, who placed her at the school. When she meets Alistair, Tom’s former roommate, she falls in love. But Mary is already very involved with Tom.
“I treat research like method acting,” says Cleave. “To write this book, which is set in London under rationing and Malta under siege, I put myself on wartime rations in order to understand the effects of hunger. For a year I listened only to the popular music of 1939 to 42, and read only books that were published in those years. I interviewed people who remembered the war in London and Malta, and of course I did an enormous amount of book work, deep in the dusty archives of libraries.”
Cleave says there are important WWII collections in many public records offices and libraries across London. However, few are digitized. He had to go there and search through them by hand.
“While writing Everyone Brave is Forgiven, I had the privilege of talking with veterans and survivors of WWII,” says Cleave. “What they tell you is nothing like what we see in all those war movies. The truth is messier, weirder and far more human.”
Cleave wrote three novels before his latest. They are Incendiary, Little Bee and Gold. He’s won the Somerset Maugham Award and been shortlisted for the Costa and for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He’s also won the Book of the Month Club’s First Fiction award and the Prix Spécial du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs. Incendiary was made into films starring Michelle Williams and Ewan Macgregor.
Marysue Rucci at Simon & Schuster is Cleave’s editor. “People don’t realize how much work publishers do,” says Cleave. “There’s an enormous set of tasks to be perfectly conceived and executed in order to make a book the best it can be, and to introduce it to booksellers and readers. I met Marysue Rucci when she offered for my second novel, Little Bee. I liked her immediately. The process is that I write, she reads, she gives notes and I rewrite.”
Jennifer Joel at ICM and Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White are Cleave’s agents. “I sent my work to everyone I knew and many more I didn’t, again and again,” says Cleave. “Until it found people who wanted to take things further. There’s no secret to finding an agent. You just write the best you can, show your work to others, and have a mindset in which you are always improving and ready to learn through criticism. You improve through the rejections.”
Chris Cleave was born and continues to licve in London.
Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave. Hardcover, 432 pages, Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 3, 2016), Language: English. ISBN: 9781501124372 $26.99
