Intricately researched and endlessly empathetic, In Memoriam follows a pair of teenagers as they progress from a joyful existence at their English public school to the depths of the trenches and, brave but broken, back home again.
Here’s the rub. The lads are in love with one another. Of course, their love dare not speak its name. They wonder silently, like many before them, if they are homosexual or just bored.
We begin in the summer term of 1914 at Preshute College in Wiltshire (based on the author’s alma mater, Marlborough). Spirits are high, patriotism is rife and best friends Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt read weekly in the school newspaper of the deaths and wounds of their contemporaries on the front line.
Restless and repressed, Gaunt enlists unexpectedly and it isn’t too long before Ellwood follows. War is depleting the British Army. In the tension of the trenches, the boys have no choice but to confront the passion they’d concealed under playfulness at school. When peace is declared at last, England is altered for ever. What is left of Ellwood and Gaunt?
Winn’s writing can be exquisite – lyrical and erudite with appropriate dollops of humour – and she is at her best when describing the sheer brutality of war. Her words help us feel, really feel, how incomparably wretched it was to endure that conflict.
The ground is ‘springy with corpses’. The boys can hardly think as ‘the constant indignities clotted the mind’. At the Somme, ‘every bullet hit flesh, because the field seethed with it’. Such images live long in the memory.
Her handling of Edwardian social norms – regarding sexuality and class in particular – is thoughtful and arresting. Never casting aside her modern lens, she layers the gentility with often eye-popping violence, sex and gore. It is a brave reader who absorbs these without pause.
Winn, 30, lives in Brooklyn and is a screenwriter by trade. She has, unsurprisingly, already sold the film rights to In Memoriam. Much of the novel is beautifully filmic; scenes stay with you as if underpinned by the superb cinematography and soaring score that are surely coming our way.
You will probably pick this book up as a gay love story set in the trenches. You may well put it down as our generation’s most evocative account of the ravages of war.
By Becky Ladenburg
June 2023
