In 1915, D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, moved to the Cornish coast and spent two years living in a cottage in Zennor. (You can read a little bit more about that here and see pictures of the cottage where they stayed here.)

In her debut novel, Zennor in Darkness, Helen Dunmore imagines a friendship between the Lawrences and a local girl, Clare Coyne. It is the nearing the end of World War 1, 1917, when the story takes place and suspicion and paranoia are rampant, so the fact that Lawrence’s wife is German and Lawrence himself is vehemently opposed to the war is the cause of much consternation and rumour mongering among the locals.

This is also a novel about Clare, who lives with her widowed father, and spends time with her extended family, particularly her cousins Hannah and John William. When John William returns from France, it is easy to see that the war has changed him, and the easy relationship between the cousins is forever altered.

He is lost to her. He is a thousand miles away, hearing the guns, seeing the ring of faces round him and knowing their chances.

Nothing much happens in this novel, yet it does capture a real sense of a specific time and place. I have been to St. Ives and so it was easy to imagine the windswept cliffs and natural beauty of the places Dunmore describes.

It is a landscape of irregular small fields shaped by Celtic farmers two thousand years ago. Lichened granite boulders are lodged into the hedges. They stand upright in the fields, a crop of stone. Lanes run tunnel-like between the furze down to the farms. Here, by the cottage, the lane dips and dampens and is lines with foxglove and hart’s tongue fern and slow drops of oozing water. It is so quiet here.

Like with her other works of fiction, Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I am a long-time fan of Dunmore and have read several of her novels including The Greatcoat, A Spell of Winter, Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, and With Your Crooked Heart (which predates this blog and was the first book I read by her) and one collection of short stories, Ice Cream. All her work has something in common: the writing is beautiful. Dunmore began her career as a poet and it shows, but not at the expense of plot. Her work is not a case of style over substance.

A beautiful read.

Edited to add: I was delighted to talk to Shawn (of Shawn the Book Maniac) about this book. My segment starts at about 7:22.

Blameless is Lisa Reardon’s second novel and finishing it means that I have now read all three of her novels. (She is also the author of several plays, short stories and some nonfiction.) I discovered her years ago when I read Billy Dead, a book that has stayed with me ever since. I also read and enjoyed her novel The Mercy Killers. She would definitely be an auto buy for me if she wrote another novel.

Mary Culpepper is in her 30s. She lives alone in rural Michigan, the oldest of three sisters. She drives a school bus, plays softball, lives alone and drinks too much. She’s a solitary character, although she is friends with 12-year-old Julianna. Mary is currently waiting to testify at the trial of Patricia Colby, a mother accused of killing her six-year-old daughter Jen. The anxiety of the trial manifests itself as the Night Visitor, a huge stone monster that visits her at night.

Mary’s life has been one of trauma. Her father was a philanderer and her parents’ toxic marriage pitted Mary between them. Her mother cautions her: “Don’t you ever trust a man […] Men are selfish sons of bitches. […] And women are worse. You scratch the surface on any one of ’em and you get a whore.”

It’s hard for Mary to escape the legacy of her mother’s thoughts about marriage and relationships, especially when her own marriage fails. That betrayal is added to the list of reasons Mary has, in many respects, removed herself from the world. Yes, she still goes to Sunday dinner at her mother’s and, yes, she has friends, but just after the discovery of Jen Colby’s body, Mary had a breakdown which required hospitalization.

The she meets Number 34.

I concentrated on the players in the field. Looked for that particular width of Number 34’s shoulders, how the muscles tapered down to the small of his back. There he was in left field, where he’d been all summer. He snagged a fly ball for the second out. Jesus, I wanted to sink my teeth into those shoulders.

Blameless is a quiet novel where nothing much happens. Mary is often her own worst enemy, but as her story is pulled back layer by layer and you come to understand all the ways life has kicked her in the teeth, you just want something, anything, good to happen for her. Reardon has a particular gift when it comes to writing broken characters and I really enjoyed my time with Mary, even though, like her previous novels, the story is pretty grim.