Unconditional Surrender - Softcover

Humphreys, Emyr

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1854112139 ISBN 13: 9781854112132

Publisher: Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd, 1997

Synopsis

This award-winning author's nineteenth novel explores the effects of the closing months of World War II on a small community in a corner of north Wales. The story is told through two voices, the local rector and a German countess in his care as a displaced person. A young conscientious objector and a gifted German prisoner of war contest the love of the rector's idealistic daughter, while the two narrators and their families negotiate the fall of fascism and nationalism and the effects of winning the war on older, established relationships.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A poignant, moving portrayal of life in a small Welsh village in the immediate aftermath of WW II, by a prizewinning poet, short- story writer, and novelist (A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, not reviewed, etc.). Beginning in the spring of 1945 and ending just as the news of the bombing of Hiroshima arrives, this spare, almost gnomic novel concentrates with penetrating intensity on a series of relationships, including that between the Reverend Edwin Pritchard and his wife Olwen, and the involvement of their idealistic daughter Meg with a muscular young pacifist (Griff Kenyon) who loves her, and a German prisoner-of-war, Klaus Wilhelm Rist, whose introversion and loneliness attract Meg's abundant sympathies. Also crucially present is the former Countess Cecilia von Leiten, a displaced person whose aristocratic German roots rouse the suspicion, and eventual outright enmity, of the townspeople, and whose presence as a guest in the rectory unsettles and changes the Pritchards far beyond their expectations. The war bleeds into every aspect of what would otherwise pass for ordinary life--an election in which Edwin finds himself embarrassingly in sympathy with ``an impassioned and impossible idealist'' whose pacifism outrages their neighbors; Edwin's contemplation of writing a history of his parish, made to seem trivial in the context of the horrors about which he is almost daily learning--incarnated in one particularly memorable (and stunningly ironic) scene: a musical afternoon at which Bach is played on the piano by a German virtuoso while the Countess is humbled into admitting the ``monstrosity'' of her culture. Humphreys doesn't deal in stereotypes or sermons: His characters are quite credibly complicated and flawed (the supposedly sensitive Klaus, for example, is a stupid misogynist), and their transformations under the pressure of history are expressed in crisp, believable, vivid dialogue. A superb work of fiction from a writer virtually unknown over here. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Trollope's The Warden is recast for the twilight of WWII, as experienced in a small Welsh town by its uneasy rector, Edwin Pritchard, and its most notable German refugee, Cecilia, the former Countess von Leiten. During the months between Germany's surrender and the atomic bombing of Japan, Pritchard gets caught up in controversy because he supports Cecilia's continued settlement at the Residential Home for Decayed Gentlewomen instead of her repatriation to Germany. In this suspicious atmosphere, as people begin to blink away their wartime certainties, Pritchard and Cecilia must also separately contend with Colonel Bacon, a gregarious blustering Home Guard Tory, Klaus Rist, an insinuating young POW, and Arthur Llwelyn, the local Welsh nationalist candidate?all of whom are queuing up for slices of the postwar pie. The personal becomes political as Pritchard casts his lot (and petrol ration) with Llwelyn's campaign, while his daughter, Meg, becomes fascinated with Rist and his normally steadfast wife, Olwen, grows too friendly with Colonel Bacon. Humphreys's old-fashioned novel lacks a certain Victorian richness, but, narrated in Pritchard's and Cecilia's anxious streams of consciousness, it arrays a wide enough social cast to capture the crowded uncertainty of a historical cusp.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1854112139
• ISBN 13: 9781854112132
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180