In Memoriam, by Alice Winn
May. 13th, 2023 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI finished In Memoriam by Alice Winn in two sittings, and I plan to say enough to fill its own post. Spoilers ahead, I’ll label them by type.
The book was recommended as a WWI-era m/m romance with a bit of litfic flair. The selling point was its treatment of the issues of the time: despite being a modern romance, it wouldn’t shy away from period-typical prejudices and bigotries. This just came up in the comments of another post, but I’ll repeat it here: I love when fiction engages with period-typical attitudes towards sexuality and other facets of identity, so I found this encouraging. I also saw praise for the writing, the enjoyability of the book, and the emotional impact. I don’t read a ton of new releases, but this seemed excitingly relevant to my interests, so I bought it and jumped in!
The novel reads like a long AU fic. There’s no other way to say it. I’d been hoping for something more litfic than that, and the first ~80 pages (of ~380, in my copy) were a period of disappointment and readjustment. Early in the novel we have an epistolary section which feels like it’s writing towards a multifandom exchange letter likes list. The sexual content in the book is more M than E, but there are some elements during those scenes which feel like a response to fandom top/bottom discourse. One example:
Don’t mistake me: I appreciate that, as a modern novel, it even goes there and gives the two leads something approaching a sex life, that it acknowledges their sexual experiences with one another plainly. But whenever I hit a paragraph like that, I had to take a moment, because I just don’t expect (or really want…) something so party to online fandom discussions when I’m reading a physical book. Once I’d persuaded myself that this was a long AU (of what, I don’t know—I didn’t read these characters as expies of anything, it’s just that it felt very much like approaching fic fandom-blind) that had been printed and bound, I got along with it better.
So, overall, I didn’t find this to read particularly much like literary fiction. I had hoped for something different and was disappointed on the writing front, but it’s not objectively bad prose. There are nice turns of phrase, there are epistolary and in-universe document elements that might appeal to other readers (I’ve never been a huge fan of those), there’s even a bit of experimentalism in things like chapter lengths. But I wasn’t blown away, either, and didn’t end up noting down any quotes I loved as I read.
I really loved the leads, Harry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. The novel did a fantastic job of selling their romance—which it should! Its DNA is so clearly fic, its heritage so strongly drawn from shipping, that I would hope they make a compelling couple. They absolutely do, and this is why I finished so quickly. Gaunt and Ellwood start the novel as best friends at fictional public school Preshute, in 1914. The first few chapters establish their friendship and romantic interest in one another, thus far unconfessed. Then war is declared over the summer term and their lives begin going to shit.
Henry Gaunt, actually Heinrich Wilhelm Gaunt, half-German and large for his age (18), is urged by his mother and sister to enlist early so as to redeem the family name in the eyes of suspicious neighbors. He’s a pacifist and doesn’t want to, but after being given a white feather, he charges in. Ellwood is despondent at being left behind, and when writing letters doesn’t prove enough, follows behind. They stay in one another’s lives for the first couple of years of the war, which are bad enough, and then worse hardships set in.
I thought that I would struggle with the chapters of their mid-war separation more, since their romance is the most interesting part of the book. But it comes in far enough along, just about halfway, that I was invested and wasn’t going to back out. There’s a sequence in which Gaunt and another British officer, both POWs, narrowly escape some Germans, and it was terrifying to read. Actually, there was an earlier escape attempt as well, which goes awry, and that one had my heart racing too! So although I cared less about the various boys-turned-officers who populate most of the background roles of this novel, it was easy enough to fly through the chapters in which Gaunt and Ellwood had to play against them instead of each other.
I also have to commend the character of Hayes, an officer who initially served with Gaunt, then Ellwood. He’s our only significant working-class character in the novel and I like him and his interactions with the public school boys. There’s a very delicate treatment of how he relates to Gaunt (mostly positive, once they get over initial skepticism, as a result of both having such early exposure to the war) and to Ellwood (negative growing towards neutral, based on what Hayes had learned about Ellwood through his letters to Gaunt, with distrust possibly worsened by Ellwood’s Jewish heritage). Hayes retains a suspicious, flinty edge throughout, and thus feels like a man both suffering from marginalization and dealing with his own prejudices.
I can’t say the same for the public school boys, of which there are too many to list names, who near-universally accept Gaunt and Ellwood when they learn about their homosexuality. There’s even a (classically fanficcy!) example of an old school friend, Gideon Devi, telling Gaunt that he’d known he was gay all along—going back to when they were in single digit ages! Idk man. The author acknowledges in an end note that this is an optimistic choice, but I just… can’t go there, personally. More on this next. But in the realm of characters, this choice made a lot of them feel extremely flat, because it kicked me out of immersion in the setting. There are affecting character moments with some of these men and boys, especially when it comes to hearing them talk about their deceased friends and brothers, but I found it difficult to care about any of them when they weren’t on the page.
The novel engages with three main categories of identity, with respect to prejudice: homosexuality, wealth, and ethnicity. The leads are gay, of course, as are a handful of side characters but not most. Hayes is working-class, and we see how the upperclass public school boys judge him and misstep in conversations with him, and how he’s continually passed over for promotion in favor of those younger boys. Ellwood is Jewish on his mother’s side, though she or her family converted to the CoE at some point—still, he’s conscious of his appearance (primarily his curly hair is mentioned) and his reputation with regard to money. Gaunt is German on his mother’s side, and faces distrust at the home front before he enlists. Gideon Devi is Indian, and in his character’s introduction, his personality is illustrated by how he responded to schoolmates who bullied him about this.
Of the categories, I liked the treatment of working-class Hayes dealing with upper-class Gaunt/Ellwood/the others best. Hayes wasn’t ever fully right nor fully wrong, and though e.g. Ellwood would be shown making an ass of himself, there was a strong and believable reason for these characters to respect each other (serving as officers in the same company, having experienced the same horrors of war). There wasn’t a clean, tidy answer as to how to resolve class prejudices, and though we can see a progression from outright distrust to something more charitable, the novel doesn’t insist on us seeing these characters as charmed best friends.
I wanted to like the treatment of ethnicity more. Jewishness is particularly important to me, so I very much appreciated the idea of a Jewish lead, and I can also engage with that Jewish lead having a complicated relationship to his own Jewishness! But it felt underexplored and a bit shallow. Ellwood, Gaunt, and Devi, each for their own ethnic identity, hear the same handful of insults. Devi and Ellwood respond by charming people into being their friend. Gaunt tries to punch people. The problem mostly goes away, because they’re surrounded almost exclusively by good friends who see them as full people. I didn’t get a great sense of what these identities meant to any of the characters beyond that they didn’t enjoy being stereotyped or insulted based on their ethnicity, which, like, fair. Yes. But what, if anything, did they like about their heritage? If nothing, at least use more space for internal reflection on that—we get both Ellwood and Gaunt POV chapters.
But my least-favorite category of “period-typical bigotry” in the novel was homosexuality. It honestly felt like lip-service. There is one significant impact of someone finding out that Gaunt and Ellwood are gay which happens around the middle of the novel, and as a result drives the plot forward. That is worth noting. However, when the bigoted character sees the impact of his choice, he apologizes for his actions and seems to regret them. Every single straight friend manages to either quietly accept their homosexuality or openly embrace it. They don’t seem to bother keeping it much of a secret at all! Look, I enjoy sexual repression in this era. It’s my narrative kink. I am biased. But even beyond that, I just keep circling back to “reading this was reading an AU fic,” because that’s how we tend to handle it in the fanfic world when we don’t want to make our faves’ lives too difficult: well, their friends and family can be fine with it! It’s just a spot of homosexuality in 1916 England. In many ways I would have found this more believable if more of the friends had themselves been queer, but we’re very clearly told that most are not. It was just too pat for my preference.
I went in spoiled, on purpose. I like spoilers. So I knew that Gaunt and Ellwood both survived the war and were together. I didn’t know about the fates of any other characters, but I also didn’t care about them when reading, so their deaths (they mostly died) weren’t really important to me. Except Hayes. I’m glad he lived.
The final chapters speed through Ellwood suffering from PTSD (shell shock). I’m always a little frustrated when a story introduces something big and life-altering and messy like that at the very end, alongside time-skips, and expects me to be emotionally invested in its consequence. An entire extra book could have been written about Ellwood’s PTSD and how that affects him and Gaunt attempting to build a romantic relationship that can last through peacetime. We didn’t get that book, we got a few chapters covering as many years, and it felt rushed. This is the area most ready for fix-it fic.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading In Memoriam. I enjoyed it in the way that sometimes you open up a new AO3 link and realize, within the first 500 words, that this fic is really going to deliver on some of your favorite tropes, and it’s going to string together a solid story in order to do so. That’s a good thing! If someone had sent me this as an AO3 link, I would absolutely be reccing it, and so I suppose I’m reccing it now. I was expecting something different enough that I consider myself disappointed, even if the reading was fast and fun. But I will be keeping an eye out for fic based on the book, and I did find the Ellwood/Gaunt romance compelling, so take that as you will.
Anyway this all got me interested in reading more about WWI, so I started my omnibus copy of Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford today. That will take eons to finish. I think I’ll have to break it up by book!
The book was recommended as a WWI-era m/m romance with a bit of litfic flair. The selling point was its treatment of the issues of the time: despite being a modern romance, it wouldn’t shy away from period-typical prejudices and bigotries. This just came up in the comments of another post, but I’ll repeat it here: I love when fiction engages with period-typical attitudes towards sexuality and other facets of identity, so I found this encouraging. I also saw praise for the writing, the enjoyability of the book, and the emotional impact. I don’t read a ton of new releases, but this seemed excitingly relevant to my interests, so I bought it and jumped in!
On the writing (minor plot spoilers)
The novel reads like a long AU fic. There’s no other way to say it. I’d been hoping for something more litfic than that, and the first ~80 pages (of ~380, in my copy) were a period of disappointment and readjustment. Early in the novel we have an epistolary section which feels like it’s writing towards a multifandom exchange letter likes list. The sexual content in the book is more M than E, but there are some elements during those scenes which feel like a response to fandom top/bottom discourse. One example:
They had barely discussed how they would do it. Ellwood knew what the assumptions were Gaunt so huge and hulking, Ellwood lithe and delicate but Gaunt's ideas of sex seemed to match up exactly with Ellwood's fantasies. He had always wanted to take Gaunt, to own him, had always been jealous and possessive. Gaunt, meanwhile, fell automatically into a rather submissive role, as if he thought Ellwood was so experienced that there was no other way it could go.
Don’t mistake me: I appreciate that, as a modern novel, it even goes there and gives the two leads something approaching a sex life, that it acknowledges their sexual experiences with one another plainly. But whenever I hit a paragraph like that, I had to take a moment, because I just don’t expect (or really want…) something so party to online fandom discussions when I’m reading a physical book. Once I’d persuaded myself that this was a long AU (of what, I don’t know—I didn’t read these characters as expies of anything, it’s just that it felt very much like approaching fic fandom-blind) that had been printed and bound, I got along with it better.
So, overall, I didn’t find this to read particularly much like literary fiction. I had hoped for something different and was disappointed on the writing front, but it’s not objectively bad prose. There are nice turns of phrase, there are epistolary and in-universe document elements that might appeal to other readers (I’ve never been a huge fan of those), there’s even a bit of experimentalism in things like chapter lengths. But I wasn’t blown away, either, and didn’t end up noting down any quotes I loved as I read.
On the characters (major plot spoilers)
I really loved the leads, Harry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. The novel did a fantastic job of selling their romance—which it should! Its DNA is so clearly fic, its heritage so strongly drawn from shipping, that I would hope they make a compelling couple. They absolutely do, and this is why I finished so quickly. Gaunt and Ellwood start the novel as best friends at fictional public school Preshute, in 1914. The first few chapters establish their friendship and romantic interest in one another, thus far unconfessed. Then war is declared over the summer term and their lives begin going to shit.
Henry Gaunt, actually Heinrich Wilhelm Gaunt, half-German and large for his age (18), is urged by his mother and sister to enlist early so as to redeem the family name in the eyes of suspicious neighbors. He’s a pacifist and doesn’t want to, but after being given a white feather, he charges in. Ellwood is despondent at being left behind, and when writing letters doesn’t prove enough, follows behind. They stay in one another’s lives for the first couple of years of the war, which are bad enough, and then worse hardships set in.
I thought that I would struggle with the chapters of their mid-war separation more, since their romance is the most interesting part of the book. But it comes in far enough along, just about halfway, that I was invested and wasn’t going to back out. There’s a sequence in which Gaunt and another British officer, both POWs, narrowly escape some Germans, and it was terrifying to read. Actually, there was an earlier escape attempt as well, which goes awry, and that one had my heart racing too! So although I cared less about the various boys-turned-officers who populate most of the background roles of this novel, it was easy enough to fly through the chapters in which Gaunt and Ellwood had to play against them instead of each other.
I also have to commend the character of Hayes, an officer who initially served with Gaunt, then Ellwood. He’s our only significant working-class character in the novel and I like him and his interactions with the public school boys. There’s a very delicate treatment of how he relates to Gaunt (mostly positive, once they get over initial skepticism, as a result of both having such early exposure to the war) and to Ellwood (negative growing towards neutral, based on what Hayes had learned about Ellwood through his letters to Gaunt, with distrust possibly worsened by Ellwood’s Jewish heritage). Hayes retains a suspicious, flinty edge throughout, and thus feels like a man both suffering from marginalization and dealing with his own prejudices.
I can’t say the same for the public school boys, of which there are too many to list names, who near-universally accept Gaunt and Ellwood when they learn about their homosexuality. There’s even a (classically fanficcy!) example of an old school friend, Gideon Devi, telling Gaunt that he’d known he was gay all along—going back to when they were in single digit ages! Idk man. The author acknowledges in an end note that this is an optimistic choice, but I just… can’t go there, personally. More on this next. But in the realm of characters, this choice made a lot of them feel extremely flat, because it kicked me out of immersion in the setting. There are affecting character moments with some of these men and boys, especially when it comes to hearing them talk about their deceased friends and brothers, but I found it difficult to care about any of them when they weren’t on the page.
On the period-typical bigotry (minor plot spoilers)
The novel engages with three main categories of identity, with respect to prejudice: homosexuality, wealth, and ethnicity. The leads are gay, of course, as are a handful of side characters but not most. Hayes is working-class, and we see how the upperclass public school boys judge him and misstep in conversations with him, and how he’s continually passed over for promotion in favor of those younger boys. Ellwood is Jewish on his mother’s side, though she or her family converted to the CoE at some point—still, he’s conscious of his appearance (primarily his curly hair is mentioned) and his reputation with regard to money. Gaunt is German on his mother’s side, and faces distrust at the home front before he enlists. Gideon Devi is Indian, and in his character’s introduction, his personality is illustrated by how he responded to schoolmates who bullied him about this.
Of the categories, I liked the treatment of working-class Hayes dealing with upper-class Gaunt/Ellwood/the others best. Hayes wasn’t ever fully right nor fully wrong, and though e.g. Ellwood would be shown making an ass of himself, there was a strong and believable reason for these characters to respect each other (serving as officers in the same company, having experienced the same horrors of war). There wasn’t a clean, tidy answer as to how to resolve class prejudices, and though we can see a progression from outright distrust to something more charitable, the novel doesn’t insist on us seeing these characters as charmed best friends.
I wanted to like the treatment of ethnicity more. Jewishness is particularly important to me, so I very much appreciated the idea of a Jewish lead, and I can also engage with that Jewish lead having a complicated relationship to his own Jewishness! But it felt underexplored and a bit shallow. Ellwood, Gaunt, and Devi, each for their own ethnic identity, hear the same handful of insults. Devi and Ellwood respond by charming people into being their friend. Gaunt tries to punch people. The problem mostly goes away, because they’re surrounded almost exclusively by good friends who see them as full people. I didn’t get a great sense of what these identities meant to any of the characters beyond that they didn’t enjoy being stereotyped or insulted based on their ethnicity, which, like, fair. Yes. But what, if anything, did they like about their heritage? If nothing, at least use more space for internal reflection on that—we get both Ellwood and Gaunt POV chapters.
But my least-favorite category of “period-typical bigotry” in the novel was homosexuality. It honestly felt like lip-service. There is one significant impact of someone finding out that Gaunt and Ellwood are gay which happens around the middle of the novel, and as a result drives the plot forward. That is worth noting. However, when the bigoted character sees the impact of his choice, he apologizes for his actions and seems to regret them. Every single straight friend manages to either quietly accept their homosexuality or openly embrace it. They don’t seem to bother keeping it much of a secret at all! Look, I enjoy sexual repression in this era. It’s my narrative kink. I am biased. But even beyond that, I just keep circling back to “reading this was reading an AU fic,” because that’s how we tend to handle it in the fanfic world when we don’t want to make our faves’ lives too difficult: well, their friends and family can be fine with it! It’s just a spot of homosexuality in 1916 England. In many ways I would have found this more believable if more of the friends had themselves been queer, but we’re very clearly told that most are not. It was just too pat for my preference.
On the ending
I went in spoiled, on purpose. I like spoilers. So I knew that Gaunt and Ellwood both survived the war and were together. I didn’t know about the fates of any other characters, but I also didn’t care about them when reading, so their deaths (they mostly died) weren’t really important to me. Except Hayes. I’m glad he lived.
The final chapters speed through Ellwood suffering from PTSD (shell shock). I’m always a little frustrated when a story introduces something big and life-altering and messy like that at the very end, alongside time-skips, and expects me to be emotionally invested in its consequence. An entire extra book could have been written about Ellwood’s PTSD and how that affects him and Gaunt attempting to build a romantic relationship that can last through peacetime. We didn’t get that book, we got a few chapters covering as many years, and it felt rushed. This is the area most ready for fix-it fic.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading In Memoriam. I enjoyed it in the way that sometimes you open up a new AO3 link and realize, within the first 500 words, that this fic is really going to deliver on some of your favorite tropes, and it’s going to string together a solid story in order to do so. That’s a good thing! If someone had sent me this as an AO3 link, I would absolutely be reccing it, and so I suppose I’m reccing it now. I was expecting something different enough that I consider myself disappointed, even if the reading was fast and fun. But I will be keeping an eye out for fic based on the book, and I did find the Ellwood/Gaunt romance compelling, so take that as you will.
Anyway this all got me interested in reading more about WWI, so I started my omnibus copy of Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford today. That will take eons to finish. I think I’ll have to break it up by book!
