Persephone book #1. Another excellent book from Persephone that I would never have found otherwise. One thing I love about the Persephone publications is that they don't really do a book summary on the book jacket, so unless you dig a little, as a reader you really don't know what you're getting into. That worked really well for this novel.

In [William - An Englishman], William is sort of floundering as an adult. His domineering mother has died and left him enough money to live on. He falls into a political group dedicated to pacifism and women's suffrage. There he meets Griselda and the two fall in love. For their honeymoon they travel to Belgium. Before they leave they hear that "some Archduke" has been assassinated, but it feels remote and they continue their honeymoon travels. While there, on a secluded farm in the countryside, they start to hear distant "thunder" and the family hosting them disappears. It becomes violently clear that they are trapped in the middle of a world war. The rest of the book details their war experience, and I won't give away any additional plot.

I really liked this. The plot was exciting and the character development and insights into WWI were well-written. ( )

"What he termed public life-a ferment of protestation and grievance...with all the extremist's contempt for those who balance"
By sally tarbox on 23 March 2018
Format: Paperback
William Tully is a quiet little clerk in pre-WW1 London, described as 'painstaking and obedient...unobtrusive and diffident. To his colleagues, he is 'a negligible quantity. He was not unpopular- it was merely that he did not matter.'
Cowed by his redoubtable mother, William finds himself - following her unexpected death- a free agent, possessed of a small income. But what to do now? "His life had been so ordered, so bound down and directed by others, that even his desires were tamed to the wishes of others and left to himself he could not tell what he desired."
By chance, he latches on to colleague Faraday, whose private life is entirely dedicated to social activism; under his tutelage, William becomes a regular at meetings promoting women's suffrage, pacifism and other causes. And here he meets his future wife Griselda; their shallow, ignorant outlook focussing on protests and struggles.
"They believed (quite rightly) in the purity of their own intentions; and concluded (quite wrongly) that the intentions of all persons who did not agree with them must therefore be evil and impure...They read newspapers written by persons who wholly agreed with their views...From these they quoted, in public and imposingly, with absolute faith in their statements."

Paying no heed to the greater world affairs of 1914, they spend their honeymoon in the Belgian Ardennes...and find themselves in the middle of hideous war. Slowly, as he witnesses the atrocities, William's mindset changes; a realisation that the trivial complaints they made about British society were as nothing compared with this:
"He remembered -quite plainly, he remembered - a letter writte to the daily Press to point out with indignation that one of the Leaders of the Movement had been hurt in the ankle in the course of the Great Civil War."

With experience, William renounces pacifism for militarism, but even here he is doomed to disappointment...

A very well-written novel; the author herself was both a suffragette and a nurse in WW1 France. Comic at times, as we follow the committed but narrow-minded young couple in their efforts to redeem society, the descriptions of the war are vivid and shocking. I'm not sure we really get to know William; written in the 3rd person, he is brought to us through Hamilton's eyes, and perhaps it loses a little immediacy through that. But an unusual and interesting work. ( )

"When you live in a crowd," he said at last, "you can always make excuses for yourself. Most likely you don't need to. If you're a fool or a coward you herd with a lot of other fools and cowards, and you all back each other up. So you never come face to face with yourself." ( )

This Peresphone classic tells the story of William Tully, a very mild-mannered, somewhat weakling of a man. Once his mother dies and he comes into a comfortable fortune he decides to give up work and go into politics. As an activist he meets the lovely Griselda who is supporting the cause of suffragettes. Convinced he's met his match they marry and plan their idealistic life together.



While William and Griselda are on honeymoon in rural Belgium they literally walk right into World War I. To say this was a rude-awakening for them is an understatement. The brutality of war is vividly eye opening for this extremely naïve couple and brings question to everything they once believed.



This book starts off light and airy and then leads you down a gritty path of reality. Beautifully written yet equally heartbreaking.



How I acquired this book: First book Peresphone "Book-a-month" subscription, birthday gift from my husband.

Shelf life: One month ( )

William Tully is a quiet unassuming clerk in an insurance office, when his mother's death leaves him a little money and the independence to please himself as to how to spend his life. A chance encounter turns the easily influenced William into a key advocate of social reform. And with sufficient funds to enable him to give up work, William finds a certain success in the new circles in which he moves, and on meeting Griselda, an ardent suffragette, he finds love in a true meeting of minds:

They believed (quite rightly) in the purity of their own intentions; and concluded (quite wrongly) that the intentions of all persons who did not agree with them must therefore be evil and impure ... They held .,, to their opinions strongly and would have died rather than renounce, or seem to renounce, them -- which did not restrain them from resenting the same attitude of mind and heart in others. What in themselves they admired as loyalty, they denounced in others as interested and malignant stubbornness.'

But although William and Griselda are portrayed by the author with all their faults, there is also something touching about the way that their romance and subsequent marriage is dealt with. While neither of them are initially appealing characters, they are irritating rather than unpleasant, and are clearly very much in love: at the end of the day they are decent human beings. Hamilton deals with their political activism and romance in a light-hearted way which does engender a certain affection for the characters, even if they are not necessarily the sort of people the reader might want to spend a large amount of time with:

'The advanced Press spread itself over the description of the ceremony and - in view of the fact that the bridesmaids, six in number, had all done time for assault - even the Press that was not advanced considered the event worth a paragraph'

But William and Griselda's marriage takes place on the 23rd July 1914, and they set off for their four week long honeymoon in a very remote part of the Belgian Ardennes that afternoon. And deliberately out of the reach of newspapers, not speaking French, and out of contact with any other English speakers, they are completely oblivious that Europe has descended into all out war. So that when the war finds them they are completely unprepared ...

This is a tremendously sad book, as William tries to come to terms with what happens in the Ardennes, and also with the complete destruction of his long cherished beliefs. For the pacifist circles in which William has moved up until that point believes fervently that the workers of Europe would in no way allow themselves to be drawn into a war which was merely required by the machinations of their governments.

There have been mixed reviews of this book on LT, but I found it a rewarding read. Some readers have questioned whether William and Griselda could be so naive as to spent their honeymoon in Europe in a time of such heightened tension, but this seems plausible to me. They are very naive in anything outside their own experience, and with the views of all around them agreeing that a war is impossible, why should they feel the need to change their holiday plans? After all, Britain hadn't been involved in a war in continental Europe since the end of the Napoleonic wars a hundred years previously, so why should 1914 have been any different? So overall I found this a rewarding and poignant read dealing with a very ordinary man caught up in events that were completely outside his experience or even imagination. ( )