Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister

 

Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister.

Published in paperback 16th September 2021 by Sandstone.

Previously published in hardback on 7th May 2020.

From the cover of the book:

1920: Britain is trying to forget the Great War. 

Clementine, who nursed at the front and suffered losses, must bury the past. 

Then she meets Vincent, an opportunistic veteran whose damage goes much deeper than the painted tin mask he wears. 

Their deadly relationship will career towards a dark and haunting resolution.

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At the end of 1917, Clementine volunteers to become a VAD nurse on the frontlines, doing all she can to help the poor wretches injured in battle as a way to find some sort of peace over the death of her younger brother in the trenches. Dirty, exhausted and emotionally drained she has little time to think of the GP fiancé Dennis she has left behind in leafy Surrey, let alone find the time and energy to keep up any sort of correspondence with him.

This is a place where every small comfort is clutched at in the fleeting moments between death and bloody mayhem - a hasty cigarette, a fitful few hours of sleep, a selfless act of kindness for a dying man to remind you that you are human - but somehow amid this hell, Clementine finds true love with a Canadian doctor called Powell. Their passionate affair and depth of feeling sustaining them through the nightmare they live day to day, as they look ahead to the time when they can settle into married life after this terrible conflict, and make a future for themselves with the child Clementine secretly carries. But then tragedy strikes. Powell is killed when their field unit comes under bombardment, and in the hazy traumatic days that follow, Clementine miscarries her baby.

The story then moves to 1920. In a Britain that is desperate to forget the war to end all wars, Clementine is now married to Dennis and expected to live the life of a respectable rural GP's wife. She has given birth to a son, but rather than bringing her joy, this event only reminds her of the child that never lived and the loss of the man she loved - none of which she has ever told her husband about. Consumed by memories of the past, Clementine succumbs to a breakdown that keeps her confined to her room for days on end, moving between a murky awareness of the time passing around her and the oblivion of drugged sleep.

As the months pass, Clementine gradually comes back to herself and achieves a fragile, if numb existence. But this is not quite the recovery Dennis believes it to be and he remains blissfully unaware of the memories that haunt her about her wartime experiences, especially since he never served in the trenches himself. During a visit to Dennis' sister Harri, who is also a war widow, Clementine feels the desperate need to escape their constant bickering about whether or not Harri should return to the family home under the control of Dennis. Fleeing the house she is almost knocked over by a male motorcyclist who for some fathomless reason reminds her of Powell - it is a meeting that becomes fateful for them both.

The motorcyclist is a man called Vincent. A former door-to-door salesman who was profoundly injured in the war, and who now wears a tin mask to cover the devastation of his half ruined face. Clementine finds herself drawn to this man, seeing him as a kindred spirit, and Vincent is not beyond preying on her fixation with him to manipulate the relationship to his advantage, even into the realms of blackmail. As events spiral out of control, the secrets and lies begin to mount up until a violent resolution to their twisted association becomes inevitable. 

Blasted Things is a wonderful novel that evokes such a feeling of time and place, and examines the legacy of unresolved trauma, grief and the mourning for lives which will never be lived. Set in one of my favourite periods of history, this novel is intriguingly unlike anything I have ever read about how the events of the Great War marked the lives of those who lived at this time, because is it shines a light on the trauma experienced by the women who served at the front through the eyes of Clementine. In many ways this turns a story about the legacy of the horror of WWI on its head, because Clementine comes home from the front to marriage with a man who is unable to even to begin to comprehend what she has gone through, and even though she is unable to share the full truth of the past with Dennis he still blunders onwards with thoughtless witticisms and petty controlling behaviours that will obviously cause her pain. 

Unsurprisingly, Clementine is desperate for a way to share the secret heartbreak she hides inside, and it is this that draws her into the clutches of a man like Vincent - a man with secret sorrows of his own, not just a half-ruined face that he keeps hidden behind a tin mask. However, Vincent is not the man Clementine judges him to be. I really enjoyed the way in which Glaister uses the idea of physical and mental trauma to compare and contrast the stories of Clementine and Vincent, each profoundly scarred and hiding their wounds in different ways - Vincent wears a mask to hide the worst of what the war has done to him, but Clementine's injuries are every bit as debilitating even though she holds then deep inside. Both are flawed in their own way, caught up in a twisted association that will bring them harm, but they are also capable of redemption - and strangely their meeting, while also leading them down a dark path, does ultimately bring this too. Even Vincent shows a certain nobility of spirit at the end, despite all he has done. 

"You see, my wound's invisible."

"Aren't you the lucky one." 

But this a book that encompasses so much more than focussing on the relationship of two damaged individuals. This is certainly a quietly devastating portrayal of heartbreak, loss, and what it means to be human, with threads that bring in equally dark themes of guilt, shame and reputation, but there are so many moments of gold among the sorrow as Glaister also touches on female sexuality and the freedom many women found after the war through the stories of Harri, the irreverent Gwen, and Vincent's object of desire Doll. There are many intimate and tender moments, even some chuckles to be had from Gwen and Harri, that bring in a warmth and lightness to the piece among the more heartrending episodes.

This may sound a gruelling read, but I can honestly tell you that this novel was an absolute delight to devour from cover to cover. Glaister's writing is simply wonderful and I cannot believe I have not read any of her books before now. I cannot recommend this book highly enough - particularly if you enjoy the very best that historical fiction has to offer, and have a fascination with WWI and the time between the wars. 

Blasted Things is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook, paperback and audio formats from your favourite book retailer.

Thank you to Sandstone for sending me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Lesley Glaister is a fiction writer, poet, playwright and teacher of writing. She has published fourteen adult novels, the first of a YA trilogy and numerous short stories. She received both a Somerset Maugham and a Betty Trask award for Honour Thy Father (1990), and has won or been listed for several literary prizes for her other work. She has three adult sons and lives in Edinburgh (with frequent sojourns to Orkney) with husband Andrew Greig. She teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.