My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

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For the next few days he watched the other patients. Patience. He was looking for good cheer among them. How did they bear it? How could they bear it? This was not a rhetorical question. He wanted to know how the others bore it, what they actually did to bear it, because he could not bear it. And he could not suddenly start to bear it just because it was over. No one ever wins a war, and wars are never over:” (265). Riley and Nadine fell in love, Riley went to war, she become a nurse..... bam a telegram arrives, their life totally changes... terrible lie that made both miserable and hopelessly in love. They sacrificed, suffered and were in pain. Their love journey was not serene, but it was beautifully painful. But they found each other. Weaving heartbreakingly painful irony, heroic sacrifice, human weakness, vanity, tragedy and the purest of loves, you’ll be left sobbing and grasping onto any hope that all is not lost amid the poppies, the guns and the hospital beds’ Op zoek naar een nieuw begin is een dappere en briljante ode aan een periode waarin de oorlog diepe wonden heeft nagelaten, en het is even ontroerend als inspirerend. Most of their love affair is through letters as Riley heads to war not too far into the novel. I didn't like their letters.. mundane, irrelevant, and too long.

Young has a historian's eye for the private details of war, and a warmth to her prose that makes her small cast emotionally engaging. If Julia feels too close to the parasitical wife in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, then both Rose and Nadine are two sides of the same coin. Like the heroines of Kate Saunders's Night Shall Overtake Us, they are emblematic of what women, too, achieved and sacrificed.

I listened to the audio version of this - read by Dan Stevens, alias Matthew Crawley. He does an excellent job of this story. The novel is a war romance but it is a deceptive title. I tried it because it was recommended but the title made it sound like very slushy romance - it's not at all. I found My Dear I Wanted to Tell You equal parts fascinating and horrifying. Although heavy with romance and war, this novel portrayed none of the romance of war. It took me a while to sink into the plot and the characters, but once I did they appeared in my thoughts when I put the novel down and although I enjoyed this novel and thought about it when I wasn’t reading it, I felt it could have been much more captivating. In general, Young is better at the female characterisation than the male and, while we spend some time with Riley and Peter on the front, much of the focus is on how those at home cope with the pressures of loved ones at war and on the impact of relationships. The casualties of war are not only the physical injuries but the mental ones, both on those who fought and those left behind. The writing, too, doesn't quite know where to fit in. At times, Young's writing is stellar, particularly in her descriptions of war (from all directions - the front, the nurses, those comfortably at home, those less comfortably at home...). Other times, however, the writing feels stilted and awkward, with forced exclamations making their way into the soldiers' speech just to make them sound more realistic. It's a jarring shift, one that can easily throw the reader off balance.

What, another World War 1 book? Is there something about the fact that no one is left alive to tell -- or criticize the veracity of -- the tale that has led to a recent flourishing (to the already robust genre) of trench literature, usually somehow connected to a story of the folks at home, maybe poets, maybe artsy? Anyway, yes, another one, and another good one. A real energy and lyricism to Young's writing, the "men" come to life, especially her hero, Riley, caught between two worlds, but the little sketched portraits of the troops and other minor characters are memorable as well. The central love story is vivid, felt, sexy and real too, and the prose moves. The plastic surgery plot line that developed was fascinating. The unveiling of the developing surgery was written so eloquently that it never seemed too heavy on medical jargon and I understood it completely. I was also intrigued with the psychology that young Riley uses to keep himself afloat and to see how different his reaction to the war is to Peter’s. Young has a historian’s eye for the private details of war, and a warmth to her prose that makes her small cast emotionally engaging ... Through Riley, however, the novel achieves an appeal to compassion and courage that deserves to reach a wide audience ... Hindsight tells us peace will not be final, but Young conveys, beautifully, the universal wish that it might be’ It seemed to Purefoy that if your legs are shot to pieces no one expects you to keep going, but if your nerve, the machinery of your self-control is shot to pieces, they do. It’s not your will, your desire, your willingness to fight on—it’s a separate part of you, but it’s one they don’t understand yet, because they never yet put this much on a soldier. Ainsworth had talked about that—how they had never before given heavy industry to war” (124). Until I was almost half way through this book, I was thinking There's not much point in reading this, as the title says it all. I could see it coming. One of the main characters would meet a violent death with so many things left unsaid. I was wrong!The work of the Doctors in facial reconstruction is deliberately described in detail as the book is largely a tribute to them (through family links of the authors) and this lends the book an unusual dimension (and unlike say in many books by Ian McEwan the detail given is not superfluous/pretentiously relayed but crucial to the book and described with insight and feeling via the passion of nurse Rose). Louisa Young writes her novels with a real historical knowledge and authenticity. The technical descriptions of the facial surgery, the emotional descriptions of the despair of young men who found themselves turned into monsters by one bullet or bomb were deeply moving. One beautifully written scene describes the horrified reaction of a barmaid when encountering one of the soldiers who is in the middle of facial reconstruction; the scene is not rushed or overplayed and the sense of sadness and empathy is overwhelming. The great strength of the book is the main characters. Young takes time to build them up and this is probably why a third of the way in I was thinking 'it's good, but I don't see what all the fuss is about'. But it means you really care for them when the story develops. By the end, I certainly knew.

Riley loves, Nadine, another main player. This love affair brings up the topic of social class. I liked how this novel shows how WWI brought together the classes and made relationships between the classes acceptable whereas they were frowned upon before the war.

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As with most books which really do get inside the stories of war, one is left with the thought Why would we ever let this happen again? But we do. We never learn. I don't go along with Tatler's comment, 'Birdsong for the new millennium.' I admit that don't really understand it. Apart from anything else, I really don't think that it is fair to compare the two books. But then, I may be biased, as Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War is one of my all time favourites. Also, how can a book about WW1 be something for the new millennium? The setting of this book is two locations in England and then mostly the worst battles of WWI. The story begins with Nadine and her brother meeting the young Riley, the son of a working class couple contrasting with Nadine's higher class. Riley is adaptable and is taken in by a high class, artist, Sir Alfred, which provides the young couple access to one another throughout their late childhood. Romance begins to bloom when Riley makes a rash decision and enlists in the European conflict, regretting it mightily. Louisa Young's ambitious new novel takes its title from a form letter sent home to British soldiers' families to alert them to their injuries during battle. It starts off quite simply, "My dear_____, I want to tell you, before my telegram arrives, that I was admitted to ________ on _________ with a slight/serious wound in my ________." The aim is to soften the blow of hearing their beloved son or husband or father was injured on a distant battlefield somewhere in Europe.