The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Despite hearing wonderful things about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from various British bloggers, I blithely assumed that as a Contemporary Novel it was not for me. But loot, only to have my mother-in-law stare bemusedly at The Parson's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim (in Virago reprint, of course) and say, "by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden? That's a real book, then? I thought they just made it up to put the Nazis off the trail -- in the book I just read, I mean, the one I was telling you about yesterday..."

I assured her it was in fact a real book, and one that I thought she'd really like, and then when I got back home again I immediately requested the Guernsey etc. from the library -- and when it came I read it all in one long sitting, something I hardly ever do these days. It may be a contemporary novel but it has all the things I usually find in older fiction, most importantly people who actually behave like human beings as I know them, rather than the tortured souls which seem to inhabit so many books nowadays... but that rant must wait for another time.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (mostly written by Mary Anne Shaffer, and then finished by her niece Annie Barrows after Shaffer's untimely death) is an epistolary novel, set in 1946 Britain. The central character is Juliet Ashton, a successful writer of non-fiction who is rather taken aback by her own success, a book-lover who feels herself a little outside of the world she's been so good at writing about. While coping with her daily life she receives a letter from a Guernsey farmer who has a book of Juliet's -- not, that is to say, a book by her, but rather a Charles Lamb book with her name & address in it that he picked up used. There are no bookshops on Guernsey since the Occupation, he writes, so he's imposing on her by letter to ask if there are more books by Lamb, and if so where he might get them.

This is one of those set-ups for a novel that is so palpably artificial that it ought not to work, and yet at the same time it is exactly the sort of thing that I (and many of my friends) might do, should the Internet disappear from the earth and our only way of finding out about books be to write random strangers. So artificial, yes, and yet I believed it -- and that's a fine summary of the rest of the novel. I could see what was coming in terms of the relationships, the revelations, the developments of intimacy, and I had the nagging knowledge that it was all too predictable, but at the same time it came together in ways that I not only understood but desired, which made it a very satisfying read all the way through.

(This is the point at which My Friend Carl would ask, "So was it a phatic novel?" and I would think about it and say that while it wasn't a content-free book, it certainly reinforced some of my own beliefs about people and literature and friendship.)

What I loved most about this novel, though, was its celebration of reading as an activity which is simultaneously intensely individual and yet capable of creating communities. The readers in the book read different texts for very different reasons, and their relationships to their readings are very personal, but in coming together to share what they've found they become deeply involved in one another's lives. Rather than developing friendships through a similarity of tastes, they find it in their willingness to listen and respond to each other's literary passions. Not that Shaffer envisions this as a simple process; I think it's key that this fictional literary society is created from the stresses of living in an occupied territory during WW2. It's only under such an enormous burden of silence and suffering can these people are willing to dive into books in the first place, much less come together to speak their authentic experience of literature.

I strongly suspect this book will be one of my comfort reads for years to come.