The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, A Rapturous Review

So, for several years, a friend kept telling me to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and I kept forgetting, because I can’t keep everything in my head can I. But then I was rummaging through a notebook and found where I had scribbled it down and so used a precious audible credit to gather it to my person. Which meant that I blew through it in something like two weeks, instead of two years.

I must pause and say that we’ve been watching Ruth Goodman’s A War Time Farm and that I’d already been swimming in a small bright sea of WWII fascination. The two together–the program and the book–sent me into some kind of enthusiastic fever pitch from which I now have to climb down, unless anyone can recommend something else to sustain my emotional, if not intellectual, frenzy.

What a lovely book. You should read it. The device to keep the reader enthralled is letters–lots and lots of letters and a few telegrams thrown in here and there. You never see anything as it’s happening. You hear about it as one person reports it to another. This caused a certain amount of anxiety in me, as I got thick in to the characters. At the end of each letter I would think, ‘Oh no! They aren’t going to say what happened next!’ But they always did. All of them.

The letters start out quite light and fluffy. I became overwrought with absorption over Juliette’s new dress, for instance, and the question of inelegant shoes. (My favorite letter, for the person who asked, has to be the early account of the throwing of the teapot). But then, when Juliette finally gets to Guernsey, the letters take–and I am truly way over sensitive to heartbreak, ignominy, and violence, so read this as the too strong reportage that it is–a darker and more painful turn. Because, as I’m sure you know, Guernsey was occupied during the war, and there wasn’t enough food, and there were plenty of opportunity for treachery, and most of the islanders ended up sending their children to England for the duration of the war, just before the Germans landed, and didn’t see them at all for at least five years.

The book takes as light as possible a touch over all these traumas, but the plot turns around one woman, Elizabeth, who is eventually sent to a concentration camp in France. However bright and cheery one tries to be, there is no way to get through those sections without wanting to cry.

As always, I couldn’t help occasionally glancing around over the wasteland of western culture, and thinking a few dark thoughts. Some of them because of the book, some of them because of the War Time Farm.

One thought was that there would have been no way to endure the incredible deprivations of that time, and the fear, and the looming death, and not come out with the moral sense that one Should Save Everything. But humankind, who had already learned to make Stuff so quickly and cheaply, used the war to hone that skill down to a fine art. So when the ration books finally went away (not until the 50s! Can you believe it!) I can see how the entire world would immediately be pitched into a stuff problem. Having too much…having not enough…where should I put it…can I throw it away…are we spoiling the planet with all the stuff…but surely I should just have this one pair of shoes more…I mean, I wasn’t there, but habits of mind are always generations long. The, “there isn’t any more where that came from” resides evermore within my spirit. But it wars with the “I am drowning in possessions and should get rid of all of them and mend this one pair of shoes forever.” Neither one ever seems to win out.

Another thought is that we, living so comfortably as we do, ought to be so much more cautious and realistic about human nature and it’s darker corners. We don’t know how bad it can be. We don’t live in North Korea. We don’t look very often into the eyes of holocaust survivors. We think we are put upon and that life is very hard and we deserve to be happy, but we don’t, and I really do include myself in this we, have a clue. So much of our cultural discourse is divorced from the hard realities of sin and death, of the violence that one person can do to another, of the actual limitations of the body, that I fear the great foolish blindness that has befallen us may not be reversible.

And a final thought is that I must go to Guernsey. I have already been to Jersey, and must, before I die, go back. But this time I must go to Guernsey as well. Not only for this book, but for Green Dolphin Street, which is also one of the best books in the world. I must go, and I must look out at the sea, and I must walk up and down and stare at the sky. I don’t know when, of course, but even more than flitting across the country to look at the Precious Moments Sistine Chapel, I must must must go to that small, enchanting isle.

And you should read this book.