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Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie SocietyBy (author) Mary Ann Shaffer
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US Kirkus Review » The German occupation of the Channel Islands, recalled in letters between a London reporter and an eccentric gaggle of Guernsey islanders.This debut by an "aunt-niece" authorial team presents itself as cozy fiction about comfortably quirky people in a bucolic setting, but it quickly evinces far more serious, and ambitious, intent. In 1946, Juliet, famous for her oxymoronic wartime humor column, is coping with life amid the rubble of London when she receives a letter from a reader, Dawsey, a Guernsey resident who asks her help in finding books by Charles Lamb. After she honors his request, a flurry of letters arrive from Guernsey islanders eager to share recollections of the German occupation of the islands. (Readers may be reminded of the PBS series, Island at War.) When the Germans catch some islanders exiting from a late-night pig roast, the group, as an excuse for violating curfew and food restrictions, invents a book club. The "Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" is born, affording Guernseyites an excuse to meet and share meager repasts. (The Germans have confiscated all the real food.) Juliet's fractious correspondents, including reputed witch Isola, Booker, a Jewish valet who masquerades as a Lord, and many other L&PPPS members, reveal that the absent founder of their society, Elizabeth, loved Christian, a German captain. No one accuses Elizabeth of collaboration (except one crotchety islander, Adelaide) because Christian was genuinely nice. An act of bravery caused Elizabeth's deportation to France, and her whereabouts remain unknown. The Society is raising four-year-old Kit, Elizabeth's daughter by Christian. To the consternation of her editor and friend, Sidney, Juliet is entertaining the overtures, literary and romantic, of a dashing but domineering New York publisher, Markham. When Juliet goes to Guernsey, some hard truths emerge about Elizabeth's fate and defiant courage. Elizabeth and Juliet are appealingly reminiscent of game but gutsy '40s movie heroines.The engrossing subject matter and lively writing make this a sure winner, perhaps fodder for a TV series. (Kirkus Reviews)
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). ************************************************ It was the pig that started it. The Guernsey Literary Society, I mean. But to tell you about that would spoil a good tale. Anyway, it was really a letter that started Juliet Ashton's story and brought her to the story of the pig. Juliet is a writer living in post-war London with food rationing, bombed buildings and her own gloom at being unable to find an inspiring topic for a new book. A letter from an unknown man in Guernsey, who has acquired a book Juliet once owned, sparks a correspondence which changes all this. And it's all because of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the very odd title of which catches Juliet's interest (as it did mine) and draws her into the lives of a group of islanders who are as unusual as their reading group. Guernsey is one of the British Channel Islands, a group of small islands which lie in the English Channel closer to the coast of France than to England. War-time occupation of the island by the Germans was, it seems, one reason that the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into existence. And as Juliet's correspondence with various members of that group grows she learns much about their lives during the Occupation. Most of all, however, she discovers a group of people whose personalities shine through their letters, and inevitably she feels that she has to meet them and learn more about them. Here, after all, may be material for her next book. It certainly provided material for Mary Anne Shaffer who charts Juliet's life and progress through her letters and those of her various correspondents. The epistolary style is notoriously difficult to bring off successfully, but Mary Ann Shaffer has done it exceptionally well, especially since this is her first book and she was over 70 when she began to write it. Especially, too, as she has woven together several different stories in these letters. Alongside letters from Juliet and her new island friends, are letters to and from her publisher, his sister Sophie (a long-time friend of Juliet's), and another, American, publisher who has suddenly appeared in Juliet's life and is courting her lavishly. Juliet's bubbly personality and her wry view of life, which had made her war-time newspaper column Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War, so popular, fill her letters, and we gradually learn a lot about her, too. The islanders' letters and they themselves, when Juliet eventually meets them, are eccentric and full of interest. Their stories of war-time deprivation and of various things which happened on the island are grim and sometimes horrifying, but their resilience, courage and love are readily apparent. Juliet gradually becomes more involved in their lives, and she is particularly interested in their memories of Elizabeth, the accidental founder of their group, and of her arrest and imprisonment in Germany for helping one of the Polish slave workers on the island. This becomes the core of Juliet's book-research, and no-one knows, in this immediately post-war period, whether Elizabeth is still alive and will return to the island to be reunited with her small daughter Kit. The harsh reality of the islanders' war-time experiences adds to the uncertainly about Elizabeth's return, but dark as these memories of the past are, the growing friendship between Juliet and Kit, and with other members of the group, fills the book with light. Mary Ann Shaffer's book is not gloomy reading. By the end, one might be forgiven for thinking that Guernsey is peopled with eccentric herbalists making witchy potions, amiable alcoholics drinking their way through their former employer's wine cellar, starchy matrons, and fishermen who concoct bizarrely inventive meals, all of whom write unusually interesting letters, but since we only meet a handful of the 1400, or so, inhabitants we could well be mistaken. So, in spite of its title, this book is not 'just another cookery book', or even 'just another book-group novel'. In spite of some dark subject matter and some harrowing and very realistic moments, it turns out in the end to be an enjoyable and most unusual love story. ******************************** Copyright © Ann Skea 2008 Ann Skea Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/ Author Biography: Mary Ann Shaffer Recent books by Mary Ann Shaffer » View all books by Mary Ann Shaffer » View all books by Mary Ann Shaffer |
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