That Summer Book

Andrew Greig, prize-winning novelist and poet, dedicates his latest novel "to the vanishing generation"--all who lived through the Second World War and That Summer, the summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain. It is a heartfelt and eloquent homage to them all, but there is no distant memorialising here. Instead, its chapters, narrated alternately in two voices, Len's and Stella's, speak with wonderful immediacy and tactility. The naive and eager, yet quietly thoughtful Len is a 22-year-old fighter pilot and Stella, a radio operator who, a year older, is marginally more worldly. As the battle in the air intensifies, Stella sits at her screen watching the little falling blips, and imagining the young Fraulein on the other side of the Channel who is "my twin, my sister, my mirror. My enemy who is not my enemy", and worries about the foolhardiness of loving in wartime. But love they do, in spite of and because of the exhausting dread, the anticipation and waiting, the ordinariness and impermanence of those haunting, sun-filled months. Noisy, frenetic pubbing, dancing, creeping home through the blackout darkness fills the ragged time in between Len's almost daily sorties in his "Hurri": "I thought of my fierce excitement just before I killed, and my numbness once I had, and then like Stella I said out loud, "What are we becoming?" And death permeates their very air. On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Andrew Greig has written a captivatingly memorable elegy; its language is alert and vivid and its emotional reach both rich and subtle. --Ruth PetrieRead More