I cannot claim credit for the title of this post, which I first heard from the lips of dovegreyreader at the recent Everyone’s a Critic event in London, but you all know what I am talking about. It is the book that is everywhere; the international best seller; the enticingly titled: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This is the story of how a sophisticated London journalist – the disarming Juliet Ashton - fell in love with and became irreparably entangled with the natives of Guernsey in the period immediately after the Second World War.It is told entirely through the medium of letters to and from Juliet proves to be a simple and effective way of telling a tale. The characters bubble through the text of their correspondence wonderfully and there is a lot of humour, a lot of lovely touches. That is not to say that it is all froth. The book deals with ideas of occupation and empire, with obedience and rebellion. The Channel Islands were effectively not defended and were occupied by Germany for almost the whole war. They were tiny little rocks in the ocean which most Britons did not give much of a thought to and yet they were uncomfortable little symbols of defeat; stages for brutality and theatres for quiet subversion.
By a strange coincidence a book previously belonging to Juliet rocks up on Guernsey and an enthusiastic native into whose hands it falls writes to her, using the recently restored postal service to the mainland. At first she is attracted to the quirkiness of what his letters contain and before too long she realises that there is a profound comment on occupation underpinning them. Behind this still there are the universal human concerns of love and friendship and loyalty. Unable to resist, soon there are letters flying about across the channel between all sorts of people and a hidden story of the conflict emerges; a story of defiance and forbidden associations. What on earth was the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and what crimes against convention did it conceal?
My two favourite things about this book are firstly that it is about the power of books themselves and secondly that it celebrates what in my view is the original human virtue: disobedience. Hurrah for that!
The characters of the island and those who touch Juliet’s life in London are, a
s has been widely commented upon, most charming. Sometimes I found them a little too charming – and their quirkiness strayed into twee-ness. They looked a little bit too much like rural folk as seen by urban sophisticates. In the same way, I found that the story was rather saccharine and almost laughably predictable. The wonderful thing about the book is that it is a fabulous idea, not that it is a fabulous novel. It is about a neglected cranny of history and it is a neatly written, good book. Personally, I would rather plump for an authentic voice from the same period such as Mollie Panter Downes. But then, Mollie Panter Downes never, as far as I know, made it to Guernsey. Maybe this is sort of what she would have made of it had she done so.Other opinions can be found at Harriet Devine’s Blog, Vulpes Libris, Bianca’s Book Blog and the lovely Stuck in a Book.
