I started this book at 10pm, in bed, and next thing I knew it was past midnight. I hadn’t even looked up. It’s a long time since I got absorbed in a book so easily. It reminded me of childhood, when I used to often read for hours. I finished the whole thing the next day, despite being kind of busy. I chose long bus routes on purpose so I would have time to read, and it’s a long time since I enjoyed a London bus so much.
The story starts in a boys’ boarding school in England. The one boy, Gaunt, is in love with the other boy, Ellwood. It’s hard enough at the best of times to tell if someone likes you back, but it’s especially hard for Gaunt, because its 1913, and despite all the boys sleeping with each other in this place (?) it’s also profoundly homophobic. And that’s the other part: it’s 1913. Gaunt enlists when the war starts, and we go to the trenches. Ellwood follows him out there.
The book is inspired by the IN MEMORIAM section of boarding school newspapers, that used to carry reports of deaths of old boys. Before the war, this section was short, but after 1914 it became lengthy, there as large numbers of teenagers from the fanciest schools started dying. It’s sad to think, for the younger boys, waiting to turn 18, how they went from the it’ll-be-over-by-Christmas enthusiasm of 1913 to just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-die in 1917, 1918.
Reading this book gave me some hope that my phone has not permanently damaged my attention span. What I need to be doing is spending more time on finding books I might actually like, because when I do, it’s like I am nine again, the internet’s not been invented, and my mind is still my own.