REREAD: TGLaPPS
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, Bloomsbury 2008.
I devoured this last weekend - abandoning any fellow feeling with correspondents waiting days for answers to their questions. It’s been a while (by which I mean over nine years) since I bought it and read it, though I remembered some bits.
As I said in my last post, it was seeing the trailer of the movie adaptation that spurred me into doing so, and I am curious as to how they’ll turn an epistolary novel, with letters from so many islanders into a film. Either characters will be dropped or combined. Mike Newell is directing, which gives me confidence, and I like many of the cast, even if Lily James is a touch on the young side to be playing Juliet. They seem to have cast a lot of actors who were in Downton Abbey, which is a canny choice. I'd hoped they'd filmed in in Guernsey, but read that they hadn't because it's a tax haven/much changed.
Rereading the book, it’s striking how slowly Guernsey comes into the story. Of course, this is about establishing Juliet and her circumstances. It’s just turned 1946, the war is over, but its ravages remain, in the form of coupons, in the form of memories and the physical testaments to them in London. Touring England to promote her book about the war, a collection of pieces written from a light-hearted perspective to keep up morale, Juliet is starting to wonder about her future, which is opening up for her now. She chiefly does this in correspondence to her editor and big-brother figure Sidney (so much less confusing than when you know he’s gay from the outset!)
Dawsey Adams is the first connection to Guernsey, it should be noted. Writing, book-lover to book-lover - and the idea of writing to the previous owner of a book is fascinating, romantic, even - he piques Juliet’s interest in what happened in occupied Guernsey during the war and in the Guernesy Literary and Potato Peel Society. It soon becomes clear that the society brought solace friendship and a love of books to people who underwent dreadful privations. It gives Juliet the writer ideas, and touches her as a human. As she starts to correspond with the various society members (Isola! Eben! One-time correspondents who add their flavour!), she becomes a friend, able to send gifts and sympathy.
Blitzed London suffered, as we get to see, but the story of the Channel Islands is less often told. In addition, through Remy and Elizabeth, we get glimpses of what happened in Normandy and the concentration camps. As Juliet wonders if determined suitor Mark is a little too determined, she is more and more interested in Guernsey, as are we, and the invitation to go there is irresistible to writer and woman. (We know Mark isn’t the right man for the Juliet, because he denies the writer in her.)
On the island, Juliet fits in, becoming a de facto islander, a mother figure to orphaned Kit. She learns more and more about the remarkable Elizabeth McKenna, who invented the society to keep them out of trouble from the Germans, (they are referred to as Germans more than Nazis, although the fact that not all the occupiers were horrible is evidenced repeatedly, most of all in the fact that Elizabeth fell in love with one, Kit’s father.)
But what about Juliet’s future? As she gives her heart to Kit and the island, her oldest friends over the Channel think they know who else has it. This time, because I knew the outcome and could see through the jealousy and misunderstandings, I enjoyed the love story more - and the incident with the stepladder is seared on my mind forever (there’s a running reference to leg injuries, by the way.)
I thought the Oscar Wilde letters were a bit much, but otherwise, the events that Juliet hears about and experiences are funny and sad, tragic and tragicomic. It’s complicated, subtle at times, and unfolds gorgeously. I hope very much that the film does it credit.
This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/154048.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
I devoured this last weekend - abandoning any fellow feeling with correspondents waiting days for answers to their questions. It’s been a while (by which I mean over nine years) since I bought it and read it, though I remembered some bits.
As I said in my last post, it was seeing the trailer of the movie adaptation that spurred me into doing so, and I am curious as to how they’ll turn an epistolary novel, with letters from so many islanders into a film. Either characters will be dropped or combined. Mike Newell is directing, which gives me confidence, and I like many of the cast, even if Lily James is a touch on the young side to be playing Juliet. They seem to have cast a lot of actors who were in Downton Abbey, which is a canny choice. I'd hoped they'd filmed in in Guernsey, but read that they hadn't because it's a tax haven/much changed.
Rereading the book, it’s striking how slowly Guernsey comes into the story. Of course, this is about establishing Juliet and her circumstances. It’s just turned 1946, the war is over, but its ravages remain, in the form of coupons, in the form of memories and the physical testaments to them in London. Touring England to promote her book about the war, a collection of pieces written from a light-hearted perspective to keep up morale, Juliet is starting to wonder about her future, which is opening up for her now. She chiefly does this in correspondence to her editor and big-brother figure Sidney (so much less confusing than when you know he’s gay from the outset!)
Dawsey Adams is the first connection to Guernsey, it should be noted. Writing, book-lover to book-lover - and the idea of writing to the previous owner of a book is fascinating, romantic, even - he piques Juliet’s interest in what happened in occupied Guernsey during the war and in the Guernesy Literary and Potato Peel Society. It soon becomes clear that the society brought solace friendship and a love of books to people who underwent dreadful privations. It gives Juliet the writer ideas, and touches her as a human. As she starts to correspond with the various society members (Isola! Eben! One-time correspondents who add their flavour!), she becomes a friend, able to send gifts and sympathy.
Blitzed London suffered, as we get to see, but the story of the Channel Islands is less often told. In addition, through Remy and Elizabeth, we get glimpses of what happened in Normandy and the concentration camps. As Juliet wonders if determined suitor Mark is a little too determined, she is more and more interested in Guernsey, as are we, and the invitation to go there is irresistible to writer and woman. (We know Mark isn’t the right man for the Juliet, because he denies the writer in her.)
On the island, Juliet fits in, becoming a de facto islander, a mother figure to orphaned Kit. She learns more and more about the remarkable Elizabeth McKenna, who invented the society to keep them out of trouble from the Germans, (they are referred to as Germans more than Nazis, although the fact that not all the occupiers were horrible is evidenced repeatedly, most of all in the fact that Elizabeth fell in love with one, Kit’s father.)
But what about Juliet’s future? As she gives her heart to Kit and the island, her oldest friends over the Channel think they know who else has it. This time, because I knew the outcome and could see through the jealousy and misunderstandings, I enjoyed the love story more - and the incident with the stepladder is seared on my mind forever (there’s a running reference to leg injuries, by the way.)
I thought the Oscar Wilde letters were a bit much, but otherwise, the events that Juliet hears about and experiences are funny and sad, tragic and tragicomic. It’s complicated, subtle at times, and unfolds gorgeously. I hope very much that the film does it credit.
This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/154048.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.