By Joan Ruddiman, Special Writer
Readers are fascinated by how an author weaves strands of thought into a beloved book. We wonder how much the writer drew from real people or events to craft compelling characters and plots. Some stories seem like they only needed someone to listen carefully enough and then retell them.
Two women grew up listening to survivors’ stories of war, horror and quiet heroism. While neither woman set out to be a novelist, these stories and characters from grandparents and history lessons persisted in their subconscious.
Mary Ann Shaffer found satisfaction in sharing the World War II stories she spent a lifetime collecting through her epistolary novel “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” (Dial Press, 2008). With her mind wandering while stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam, Jacqueline Winspear constructed the arch-detective Maisie Dobbs from memories of her grandparents who survived the “Great War.”
Both women are British. One shares stories of the Guernsey Islanders enduring Nazi occupation; the other revisits the first World War and the Lost Generation living in its aftermath. On our side of the Atlantic “pond,” we Americans can never fully appreciate what the British suffered and the miracle of how they survived two wars that devastated whole generations of men and forever changed the culture of their societies.
In the case of Ms. Winspear’s “Maisie Dobbs,” (Soho Press, 2003), the post-war breakdown of the strict class structure of Edwardian England was a blessing. She introduces readers to a remarkable young woman with quiet efficiency and extraordinary intellect who has just opened her own detective agency. Not only an independent businesswoman, Maisie is the college-educated daughter of a lowly vegetable vendor. How she rises from the ranks of a housemaid to an accepted equal of London aristocrats makes for a fascinating story.
But there is more to Maisie and the series. Mystery readers, take note. Ms. Winspear weaves clever plot lines that have been likened ýPage=007 Column=001 OK,0010.05þ
to Alexander McCall’s “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.” As a reader of both, I’ve found the Winspear series to be more compelling. Perhaps this is because I have a passion for history and am intrigued how Ms. Winspear so effectively uses the often forgotten setting of England of the 1920s and 1930s to build characters and plots.
Ms. Winspear, inspired by her family’s experiences, gives voice to women like Maisie who is one of 2 million “surplus” women in post-war Britain, and veterans like her assistant Billy Beale, who has to deal the physical and psychological scars of war.
“Over 750,000 men of marriageable age were killed; 1,350,000 were seriously wounded or ‘shell shocked’ a term first used in WWI,” Ms. Winspear writes. “Maisie represent those women who carved out a life for themselves in careers and in the arts, since the world they were born to was now gone.”
Since Maisie, her forensic psychiatrist mentor Dr. Maurice Blanche, Lady Rowan, dad Frankie and loyal Billy sprang to life, Ms. Winspear has written five books, with the sixth, “Among the Mad” (Henry Holt) to be released this month. Once again, Maisie is called to use her talents of observation and her highly tuned intuition to catch a mad man who is threatening to destroy thousands of innocent people. In 1931, the nightmare of war is still with them.
Jacqueline Winspear notes that “even those who survived, gave their lives to war.” How ironic that these same people in less than a generation would have to fight again this time for their very existence.
Unlike the ugly first World War, World War II has long been a popular subject for novels and films so much so that it is quite amazing to find something different in the genre. In the big picture, the Nazi occupation of the English Channel islands was not a major concern. But Mary Ann Shaffer knew the story, and spent a lifetime collecting tales from this little corner of a global war.
The long and seemingly silly title of Ms. Shaffer’s only book is a gem that has found a wide and appreciative audience of readers world wide. “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” ýPage=007 Column=002 OK,0000.00þ
(Dial Press, 2008) is told through letters by 20 voices, beginning with a popular London columnist who receives a letter from a farmer on the Isle of Guernsey. The farmer has a book, the columnist’s name and London address penned on the inside cover. He writes that he wants her to know how very much he appreciated the book and asks if she wants it back.
How the book got to Guernsey and how this farmer came to read it all part of the story of that oddly named “society” encompass friendship, faith and indomitable spirit in the face of fearful oppression.
Ms. Shaffer, due to illness, was unable to complete the novel and called on her niece Annie Barrows, who is a writer, to help her bring her dream to fruition. Ms. Barrows honors her now-deceased aunt’s memory as she talks about the surprisingly successful little novel that she helped edit and complete.
It is, she notes, “a voyeuristic thrill reading other people’s mail,” which indeed is part of the charm of the book. Readers figure out the history of these people and their relationships through their letters each with a distinct voice and style that makes the many characters come alive.
Readers, too, Ms. Barrow notes, “are touched by the story that centers on how people discover the love of reading, and how the world of books transcends their circumstances.”
“Books are a place of warmth and hope that save these people.”
Some reviewers have criticized the “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” for the “sunny tone,” given the grimness of the Nazi occupation and the related story of Jewish persecution. But as those who have read and adore this precious novel have noted, that these characters as in life when faced with evil, manage to let the best of their human nature shine through.
Sunny? Not really. Radiant, yes.
Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D, is the coordinator/facilitator of the gifted and talented PRISM program at the Thomas R. Grover Middle School in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District.
