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TuneInWhat do you get when you cross Journey’s End with Brideshead Revisited?
This month Angus, Chris and Jessica review Alice Winn’s best-selling new novel, In Memoriam. The book follows Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood from public school and through the war. Half-German, Gaunt’s mother asks him to enlist in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks. He signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings. But Ellwood and their classmates soon follow him into the horrors of trenches. Though Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, their friends are dying in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.
Along the way we discuss class, conscription and the difficulties of describing the boredom and violence of war in popular fiction.
References
1917 (2019)
A.J. Evans, The Escaping Club
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H (1850)
Alice Winn, In Memoriam (2023)
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Charles Carrington, A Subaltern’s War
Ernst Younger, Storm of Steel (1929)
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Ian Isherwood, Remembering the Great War (2017)
In Memoriam by Alice Winn review, The Guardian (12 March 2023)
Justin Fantauzzo and Robert L. Nelson (2016), ‘A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914-18’, Gender & History 28(3): 587-603, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12240
Heartstopper (2022)
Second Lieutenant Kenneth Macardle
Max Plowman, A Subaltern on the Somme
Pat Barker, Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995)
Peaky Blinders
RC Sherriff, Journey’s End (1928)
Rupert Brookes, Goodbye to All That (1929)
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929)
Star Trek
Stephen Fry, The Liar
The Gallows Pole (2023)
The Great Escape (1963)
The History Boys (2006)
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
This Is the Week That Was
Pat Barker, Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995)
