38 - In Memoriam

Oh! What a lovely podcast

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.

References1917 (2019) A.J. Evans, The Escaping ClubAlfred, 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 WarErnst 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 SommePat 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 LiarThe 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)