Book Review - These Days - Lucy Caldwell
I think the first time I heard details of the Belfast Blitz was when I had to do a short biography on my Grandfather, part of a GCSE history project when I was 15. He could remember standing in the haggard, watching lights over Belfast that came from the fires, some forty miles away. Shortly after, my grandparents honeymooned somewhere on the North Coast, and the train was full of child refugees, being sent to the countryside for safety.
It was the bombs of the eighties and nineties that I was more aware of from the television. This was something different, an earlier incarnation of Belfast, linked to a world war. ‘That’s us now… That’s Belfast finished,’ says someone in ‘these days’ at one stage. But we know different, that there was was more to come in later years.
The main focus of this book are the two Bell sisters, ‘flighty, impulsive, earnest Audrey’, in a relationship with a doctor, and ‘kind, stubborn, awkward Emma’ who falls for some one eleven years her senior, full of life and energy. Their parents are Phillip, also a doctor, mother Florence and younger son Paul. They live in a middle class area of East Belfast.
Belfast Blitz
The story takes place over four nights in 1941, when 100,000 incendiaries fell, 10,000 homes were destroyed and over 1,000 peoples lost their lies. These are just statistics but Lucy Caldwell’s skill for me is in weaving the inner lives of the characters with the destruction visited upon the city.
One of the best ways prose comes alive for me is when I hear the characters in my inner ear and this book is a brilliant example of that. I love the ‘gulders’, the ‘boys a dear’ (I’ve heard my father say this), ‘the so-you-coulds’ and the ‘heart going like the clappers.’ It really gave the characters depth and I got a laugh out of the ‘insanitary bombs.’
The devastation, when it comes, is described in the most haunting imagery. I’ve stood in St Georges Market, and could easily hear the ‘clattering, hammering noise,’and see the ‘bulging hessian sacks.’ The details like the roaming packs of dogs, the wandering lost souls, blackened with soot, calling out childrens names, the escaped black horses belonging to the undertaker, Maisie and Bobby…they all struck a chord with me.
The aftermath of the bombing and the fires really got me in this book, maybe more so this past week with the events in Ukraine. I was really drawn to Emma and Audrey, their hopes and dreams playing out in the midst of this horror. People are still falling in and out of love, making plans for the future and wondering what might have been if a different path had been taken. Lucy Caldwell does a wonderful job in capturing this.
There’s also a switch to another characters voice at a later stage in ‘these days,’ which I wasn’t expecting and would usually annoy me. It’s another viewpoint with regrets when it comes to love, vulnerability and uses a really striking image; it caught me unawares and it works really well.
Like I say, in the week that’s in it, ‘these days’ resonated with me. I felt drawn to the emotional lives of the characters and was deeply moved by suffering in the city, and it’s described with such an economy of language and flows so well from page to page. It’s well researched but it’s woven so finely into the story that it’s effortless. To continue the analogy, you can’t see the stitches and it’s just a pleasure to read.
It’s only the beginning of March and I’ve already read three really strong books by three women from Belfast this year - Lucy Caldwell, Wendy Erskine and Jan Carson. I’m including this as part of Reading Ireland month with Cathy over at 746books and am looking forward to hopefully discovering more novels as good as this.
I received this Advanced Reader Copy from Faber and Faber and Netgalley in return for an honest book review. Many thanks to them both and to Lucy Caldwell.
Update June 23 - Congratulations to Lucy on winning the prestigious Walter Scott Fiction Prize 2023 for ‘these days’. Well deserved!