Flatlands

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I understand that the book is loosely based on “The Snow Goose” by Paul Gallico which I failed to understand when I read it as a child, and which now seems perfectly clear to me, thanks to “Flatlands”. Soon it will pass from living memory and be no more relevant than the Battle of Waterloo,” Freda muses in her diary.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:Freda is a twelve-year-old evacuee from the East End, sent to live with a farming family deep in the lonely landscape of the Fens. The book gave some good descriptive details of the landscape and the lives of the local people at the outbreak of WW2.The relationship between Philip and Freda feels slight and underdeveloped, given its significance for both their later lives. Photograph: Joe Rey/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘An evocative landscape, lonely and bleak’ … the Fens in Flatlands. The story is told by 87 year old Freda, looking back at her life and how her course was changed by her short time with Philip. She forms a very lovely and quiet friendship with Peter, a young man in his 20s who is trying to make sense of his own feelings about who he is, who he loves, and his objections to the war. Flatlands' reminds me a little of the novels of Helen Humphreys but her voice is less poetic and more ordinary.

I received this book during our Book Club Yankee Book Swap (fun night where I got to open three different things but had them stolen and where the book Ketty helped me pick out was first picked and often stolen -- lots of swapping this year). A haunting and lyrical novel about loneliness and the compensations of the natural world, art and unlikely friendships.Their friendship is really wholesome, and it reminds me of an older brother looking out for his younger sister. Stories are created from silence and absence, though the space between words can be so wide you feel you might drown.

The author does a commendable job of exploring life in wartime England both from the perspectives of a child separated from her family and a recluse who is a conscientious objector.Based loosely on The Snow Goose by Gallic and set around Peter Scott’s lighthouse in Lincolnshire, it tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Freda and Philip, during WW2. There, deprived of any warmth, she meets a young man – Philip Rhayader -a conscientious objector who has left Oxford and his prospective vocation in the church following a nervous breakdown. Did she make a transition from her sad lonely life as an evacuee to one that was warmer and more fulfilling? Certainly not an easy read, but one to savour – an important story imbued with an immersive sense of place and written in gorgeous poetic prose. Freda visits Philip in the lighthouse and these two lost souls find companionship and discover a shared project – that of caring for a wounded albino goose.

We can surmise Philip’s fate but not to offer any glimpse as to Freda’s life seems frustrating and unsatisfying. I think this would be an excellent book club choice as well and makes for a great summer read for so many readers when it goes on sale in the US in mid June.Too many names of prominent artists and intellectual figures of the time and too many details from BBC Home Service war reports also added to the tedium. A bond is formed between these two, as a conscientious objector he is considered somewhat of an outsider, someone who doesn’t really fit in with his family, or with a country at war, and she is definitively an outsider, a child far from home. During WWII in England, Freda became an evacuee and billets in Lincolnshire where bombs may potentially fall. A World War II novel family rooted in the countryside of East Anglia around Kings, Lynn and Wisbech, this story tales of a young girl, evacuated from wartime London to the countryside.