Published 9th March 2020 by Fentum Press.
Read June 2020.
1975: Joan Kite, widowed since World War II, lives with her only daughter, Maud, trapped in a brittle love-hate relationship that neither of them seem able to escape.
Joan has grown increasingly bitter over the years, out of step with the world she is living in; mourning the loss of the life she once envisioned for herself; regretting the sacrifices she believes she has made for her daughter; and ruing the person Maud has become under her guardianship.
In a rare act of spontaneity on Maud's part, she suggests that Joan should write about her life to make sense of the past that has brought her to where she is now, and although she is reluctant at first, Joan soon takes some relish in venting her spleen in her notebooks.
When Joan begins to tell her story, we start to understand why she has become alienated from the world around her, and she holds nothing back in the telling, including the details of a long held secret that binds her daughter to her, and has helped form the complex and twisted relationship they enjoy.
As the compelling story plays out to its shocking conclusion, we are left in no doubt about how disappointments and power plays within family relationships can make them go terribly awry, especially between mothers and daughters.
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Don't You Know There's A War On? is a novel that positively oozes with the weight of past disappointments, the bitterness they cause, and how they can affect the relationships between family members.
When we meet Joan and Maud, it is soon evident they are trapped in some kind of corrupted mother-child relationship that has brought them spiraling downwards into a poisonous pit of deep dark resentments. To comprehend how they have got here we need to understand Joan, and it is through her account of the life she has led, especially that part played out against the War years, that we get to appreciate how she has been shaped into the person she is - and has subsequently shaped her daughter too.
Joan's upbringing is one of loneliness and emotional neglect, and the arrival of the Second World War puts paid to her ambitions to be free of her past. Instead Joan becomes a widowed single mother, the result of circumstances that will eventually hit us like a punch to the gut as the story plays out, and she sees her chance for a better life taken away by the small human being who is now dependent on her. Although the War also brought the chance of some independence and companionship to Joan, through working towards the war effort, this too is eventually taken away as women are "demobbed" when peace time comes around again - consigning them back to their former domestic lives. She has been promised great things by King and country, but the reality is hard indeed, especially for a war widow with no prospects.
'Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive. You don't forgive a person for messing this up. You don't forgive your country for fooling you either.'
Motherhood does not come naturally to Joan, and she has no experience of love. The only way she can cope is by adhering to the strict standards she imposes on herself, and her child, and maintaining the appearance of gentility. She has been told that sacrifice is required of everyone in wartime, so there is no point in complaining, and the phrase "Don't You Know There's A War On?" is for ever ringing in her ears.
As the years go by, Joan finds she understands the world around her less and less. Her ethos of discipline and self-sacrifice has little to do with the modern age in which she now lives. She has never allowed herself to drop her guard, or to come to terms with her own repressed desires and resentments, and she has no notion about how to be a nurturing mother to her equally lost and confused daughter. Rather than bringing her child up to be strong and forceful, she finds her a great disappointment, and has no compunction about making this clear to Maud.
But Joan is also unable to let go of the daughter she has raised and made the centre of her life, and when Maud has a chance of happiness Joan can't help but destroy this, even if it leads to the destruction of them both.
"What sort of private hell have the two women created in this house?"
And the road to their destruction is most beautifully written by Janet Todd, and she drags you down into the pit of torment Joan and Maud have made for themselves in the most deliciously seductive way imaginable. There is so much unsaid between these women, unable as they are to break through the barriers they have built up between them over the years - so much is hinted at by our writer, especially in terms of repressed sexuality, that has never been allowed to break through the veneer of cold, if threadbare, respectability fostered by Joan.
"This writing, this memory, this scratching with jagged nails
in the graves of one's head, is not for the fainthearted.
Not everyone welcomes the dead coming up from deepwater."
But Joan finds herself holding nothing back in her diary. Her reminiscences are heart-rending and painful, sharply observed, sardonic and sometimes downright funny, but there is an underlying bitterness that is difficult to overlook - even when you know the truth behind Joan's story, and see the unfairness behind her plight - that makes it difficult to like her. A feeling which is compounded by her tendency towards the uncomfortable realms of the taboo as her strength begins to fail and her ideas of love become ever more warped. Ultimately, the cruelty and coldness towards Maud colour your view of Joan to the point that it is impossible to forgive her behaviour towards a child that has no responsibility for the loss of the life her mother feels she deserved.
This is a complex and powerful book, exploring the difficult relationship between a mother and daughter that has been irrevocably disrupted by events beyond their control. Janet Todd chooses her words with utmost skill throughout this incredible novel, and I was particularly struck by the clever way she uses the senses, principally smell and touch, to elicit strong emotion and longings in her characters.
I found myself jotting down many extracts of sublime writing from this book, and could so easily reproduce quote after delicious quote for your reading pleasure in this review, but I would be doing you a disservice if I did as you should really discover them yourself - I promise that you won't be sorry you did.
Don't You Know There's A War On? is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer, in ebook and paperback formats.
Thank you to book publicist Ruth Killick for sending me a copy of this novel in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.
From the cover of the book:
'Oh to come from somewhere else, to be going to a place far away. Somewhere where the air was crisp and the talk witty, brittle and allusive. You don't forgive a person for messing this up. You don't forgive your country for fooling you either.'
Joan is a widow, an outsider in a diminished England, where she lives with her only daughter, Maud, angrily conforming to a culture she feels has left her behind.
When Maud is threatened, Joan begins a diary to make sense of her alienated past, before and during the War. Giving rein to a loathing for the society that has thwarted her aspirations, she is merciless, her writing often sublimely funny; but Joan has a secret, never confided, which binds Maud to her.
As Joan chronicles her life, her observations reveal psychological dramas, which, once uncovered, lead to a shocking conclusion.
Played out against the turbulence of the Second World War and its aftermath, Joan's story is one of a complex mother-daughter relationship, an evocation of the complicities that poison familial attachments and affect intimacies between women.
Its nuanced portrayals of the power plays in unbalanced relationships make for a compelling tale of human and political failings. An adroit satire of disintegrating worlds, the novel enthrals and surprises; it confirms Janet Todd as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.
About the author:
In the US, at the University of Florida and Douglass College, Rutgers, she became active in the feminist movement and began the first journal devoted to women's writing. She has published on memoir and biography, as well as on authors including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, Byron and members of the Shelley circle. Her lifelong passion has been for female novelists, both the little known and the famous.
A Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Janet Todd is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she inaugurated a festival of women writers and established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She lives in Cambridge and Venice.
A Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Janet Todd is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she inaugurated a festival of women writers and established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She lives in Cambridge and Venice.
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