On the evening of Nov. 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe launched a devastating air attack on the English city of Coventry. Wave after wave of bombs flattened the factories so crucial to the country's war effort, and obliterated the entwining residential streets. Coventry Cathedral, the largest parish church in England - and a proud national symbol of faith and prosperity - burned to the ground. Low estimates put the death toll at 568. For her latest book, award-winning novelist Helen Humphreys aims her clear, telescopic eye on this bleak and endless night, with a plot that flips back, on occasion, to the previous world war.
Coventry
, by Helen Humphreys, HarperCollins, 175 pages, $24.95
Humphreys is known for eloquent, tightly focused stories that write women into history and toy gently with gender roles. Her novel Leaving Earth, which earned her a City of Toronto Book Award, recounted the experiences of two female aviators attempting to break a world record in Depression times.
At the opening of Coventry, Harriet Marsh, disguised as a man, is volunteering on the roof of the cathedral. Watching for fires is a man's job, but she is filling in for a friend who has hurt his leg. That Harriet happens to be at the church the night of the attack is a fluke of fate, just as it is a fluke that she continues to reside in the city. She had moved to Coventry as a newlywed more than 25 years before. Soon after, her husband, Owen, was killed in the Battle of Ypres. To Harriet, Coventry has never felt like home, merely the place where she was once happy and in love.
When flames engulf the cathedral, Harriet escapes with a fellow firewatcher, a young man named Jeremy. The heat and horror of their predicament speedily forges a bond between them. Together, they brave falling bombs, collapsing buildings and burning streets. They pause to pull people from the rubble and help the injured. Harriet is anxious to return to her flat while Jeremy is desperate to locate his mother, Maeve. But Maeve has joined the long queue of refugees streaming out of the burning city into the outlying countryside, where she hopes to meet up with her son.
Humphreys's prose is enhanced by her poetic precision, along with a flair for indelible images
The Coventry blitz is the latest in a series of German air raids. The Standard Motor Works has been destroyed and also the Rex Cinema, where Harriet had planned to attend a showing of Gone with the Wind. The film serves Humphreys as inspiration: Ashley and Melanie's goodbye scene is echoed in Owen's farewell to Harriet, while blazing Coventry mirrors the burning of Atlanta.
Jeremy's last name is Fisher, like the frog in the Beatrix Potter story, recalling the classic childhood tales Harriet still loves to read. More to the point, Jeremy is very young, about the same age as Owen at his death. Inevitably, Jeremy becomes mixed up in Harriet's mind with memories of her husband.
Sometimes the parallels between events and individuals and places - the sense of history repeating itself - can feel overdetermined. For instance, Humphrey's description of Ypres, which Harriet visits at the end of the First World War, prefigures nearly exactly Coventry's destruction, down to charred trees and demolished cathedral.
At the same time, Humphreys's prose is enhanced by her poetic precision, along with a flair for indelible images, exemplified in this snapshot of volunteers on the church roof: "For a few minutes the fire-watchers live up to their name - four dark figures stamped against a moonlit sky, standing sentinel on the roof of the cathedral while the edges of the city begin to curl up and burn."
