What 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
Second Lieutenant Kenneth Macardle
Heartstopper (2022)
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)
27 - Over the Top Magazine
26 - Textiles
25 - The Contemporary Image of the Junior British Officer
24 - Football
23 - Charley's War
22 - Classical Imagery
21 - Russian Myth and Memory
20 - Short Stories
19 - Franz Ferdinand
18 - Sounds of War
17 - Theatre and the First World War
16 - 37 Days
15 - Computer Games
14 - Sam Mendes' 1917 and the Landscape
13 - Popular Films First World War Films
12 - Obscure First World War Films
11 - Board Games
10 - The Christmas Truce of 1914
09 - 'Blasted Things' with Lesley Glaister
08 - Dreamers of the Day: TE Lawrence
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