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."
She might be accused, now and again, of taking a poetic notion too far; for instance, in the scene set in a hotel room in Ypres at the end of the First World War: Harriet has spent the day visiting the battlefield where Owen died. With some coal and a piece of cardboard, she begins to draw swans.
"What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn't come, couldn't come. I don't know how to make you return to me.
"But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow-darkness lifting me home."
These lines seem overwrought, until one recognizes them for what they are: an expression of grief so nakedly, painfully true that the reader is tempted to look away.
Harriet's swan essay turns out to be the first of her written "descriptions." Back in Coventry, she will spend her spare time studying, observing and delineating the city's historical structures and natural life. One winter day, Harriet recalls, she "wandered over the snowy fields outside Coventry, following the weave of old stone walls across the landscape. She was trying to write a description of the walls, had become obsessed with them, how they were made by human effort though they looked so natural. Harriet remembers that day as joyful, a rarity in her days. Somehow the walking and the cold and the wave of the walls and her foggy breath pulled her back to early childhood, to a feeling of being wholly present and wholly purposeful."
Jeremy's mother, Maeve, on the other hand, is an artist. She is never to be found without the sketchbook in which she records whatever aspects or objects strike her fancy. Humphreys offers artistic expression - writing and drawing - as an innate response to human experience.
Coventry is a small-format book of 175 pages, easily completed in a single sitting. Humphreys's simple, declarative sentences reel us into the novel and never let us go. She captures, most alluringly, the joyful and solitary nature of the human heart, which she renders as a swallow flying above the cathedral: swooping, soaring, untethered, free.
Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing, and author of What's a Black Critic To Do? She is writing a literary memoir of the U.S. South.
