Julian Fellowes meets E.M. Forster in The Summer Before the War, Helen Simonson’s overlong but ultimately rewarding and moving novel about the last gasp of Edwardian England in 1914.
Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand) is a bit like a home cook borrowing from professional chefs: her recipe calls for a dash of Downton-esque wit and gossip, a sprinkling of Virginia Woolf feminism, and a cupful of colorful characters, a la Forster’s A Room With a View. Throw in a dreamy, Rupert Brooke-like World War I poet and an expatriate novelist modeled on Henry James, and you’ve got a concoction brimming with literary influences.
Well, there are certainly worse things in the world of historical fiction.
The Summer Before the War (Random House, 473 pp., *** out of four stars) is set in the picturesque village of Rye, England, which indeed was the adopted home of James. Here he is called Mr. Tillingham, and he’s just one of the local stuffed shirts who also happens to have no great opinion of women.
Enter Beatrice Nash, an aspiring writer who has come to Rye after the death of her father to teach Latin to ruffian schoolboys. Nothing is going to be easy for our young heroine, whose inheritance is in the hands of stingy executors, and who is determined to do “salaried work” and never marry.
Hugh Grange, a 24-year-old surgeon and solid citizen about to be engaged to another girl (Dan Stevens, are you available for the film version?), obviously is Mr. Right from Chapter One. Will our Beatrice/Miss Elizabeth (yes, Jane Austen rears her head, too!) finally realize it?
There are many pages to go and florid descriptions to wade through first. Everything in Summer is a bit muted and proper; it simmers for a long time. Happily, Simonson has thrown enough humor and soap-opera-ish intrigue into her pot to keep us from starving. (Among the myriad plot points: the arrival of Belgian refugees, a read-between-the-lines homosexual love affair, and the heart-tugging story of a teenage Gypsy boy named Snout.)
Then suddenly, in the last 80 pages, Hugh and his cousin, the pretty poet Daniel, are sent to the front in France, and Simonson discovers her inner war novelist, and she’s dynamite. Domesticity gives way to destruction, and we're riveted. Summer is over, the world has changed, the author has risen to the occasion — and found her own voice.
