They are fighting their war in the last world, but we’re dying in this one.
January 1918. Laura Iven, a revered field nurse, wounded when the Germans bombed the munitions depot her field hospital was next to, is discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Months later, back home in Halifax, Canada, Laura lives assisting three elderly mediums after the deaths of her parents. On the night that Pim Shaw, a young widow seeking to connect with her son, arrives for a seance, Laura receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—including both of his dog tags, a fact that doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium with Pim as volunteers at Mary Borden’s private hospital, where they soon hears whispers about haunted trenches and a strange fiddler whose wine (and songs) give soldiers the gift of oblivion, and the cracked black mirror hanging above the bar shows them their greatest desires; but once you leave, you can never find the bar again. Could Freddie have actually escaped the battlefield, only to fall victim to someone—or some thing—else?
November 1917. Wilfred “Freddie” Iven awakens to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with Hans Winter, a wounded enemy soldier. Against all odds, the two decide to rely on each other and succeed in escaping their almost tomb. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, or of taking each other as a prisoner, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear. He asks for so little in return; only a memory.
As shells rain down on Flanders, the Germans march ever closer to breaking the Allied line, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas (and nightmares) are brought back to the surface. Now even if they can find their way back to each other, they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.
Bittersweet is, I think, the best word to describe the ending of this book. Or more aptly, as “Once More With Feeling” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer put it:
I think Arden did a really good job of portraying the horror and the hopelessness that pervaded the front in World War One. I thought it was interesting how the ghosts were worked into the plot, as little used as they were. The characters were all very nuanced and fleshed out; I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Mary Borden (and the Queen of Belgium, for the little she’s in it) weren’t the only historical figures to factor in this book, everyone was so realistically portrayed. Laura I adored; she’s very dry-humored, forthright, loyal to her family and dedicated to her work in nursing; if she can do a Canadian accent and would be willing to go blond, I could see Michelle Dockery playing her. I also appreciated that in Laura, Arden shows that it was not just the soliders whose bodies showed the scars of war, nor were they the only ones whose hair started to go prematurely white. The mentioning of how dirty war wounds on soldiers would equal dirty infection in nurses leading to scarring and early arthritis was something I never knew, but seems to make sense to me. Probably next to Laura, Jones was my favorite character; for a man who when he’s first introduced seems like a social cue-less automaton, he turns out to have one of the truest hearts, and that’s shown in more than his donating blood to try a new idea he’s had about transfusions (it’s okay, he’s typed his blood; it’s O-Neg, of course). Pim, I guess goes to show that a cheerful and slightly naive appearance will cause people to not look too closely at your sanity levels. Mary was a forthright no-nonsense woman (or a b*tch, if you want to be blunt), Gage was so stereotypically upper-crust British officer material (he may be Irish, but my guess is that’s Northern Irish), and his nephew Young is incredibly earnest and a try-hard; it’s a pity when he inexplicably disappears in the middle of a scene. Freddie and Winter are where the book truly goes to show the psychological damage done during war; they also show the speedrun that happened in relationships a lot during the time, as well as WWII (the book bills itself as a queer romance ghost story; there’s no spoilers here). Faland, well Faland: there’s not much to say about him without spoiling a major plot point; suffice to say, I figured out who he was well before Freddie did, but that could be because it seemed a little like “who else could he be?” I thought it interesting that the book leaned so heavily on Laura and Freddie’s parents being hyper-focused on the Book of Revelation; though I suppose that the time surrounding WWI would certainly lead one to believe in the end times, never mind the War itself. I appreciated Arden working in that seeing as Laura’s father is a boat captain in Halifax, he would have been one of the men sent to retrieve the bodies from the sea when the Titanic sank; but I could have done without the (admittedly, realistic) comments about the bodies (especially the children’s) and the sea birds. That was not a mental image that I needed.
I put off reading this book for a year or so: not because I didn’t want to read it; just because I forgot I wanted to buy it until I saw it the last time I was in my local bookstore. I’m glad I finally got around to it, because it was enjoyable book, very so realistic that the supernatural elements seem more like they would happen in real life also, instead of the entire story seeming like a fictional novel. I don’t know if that sentence makes sense; it’s just the only way I could think of to describe it. Point to her and her opinion that if you want the pinnacle of Steampunk, it isn’t fictional Victorian England, but real-life World War One: corsets and gas masks, tanks and suits of armor, bombings and tanks and carrier pigeons delivering messages. WWI was when the past and the present collided and lived alongside of each other for a strange, topsy-turvy time.
But honestly, Freddie, Laura; have you two never heard of this thing called mail? You two could do that at the end of the book.