Title: Resistance
Author: Owen Sheers
Year of publication: 2007
Genre: Literary alternate history
My rating: 4 stars or B
Just days after news of the invasion came crackling through on Maggie’s wireless…the men, lit by a hunter’s moon, met at William’s milking shed and slipped out of the valley. Moving in single file they walked through the higher fields and up over Hatterall ridge; an ellipsis of seven dark shapes decreasing over the hill’s shoulder, shortening to a last full stop and then nothing, just the blank page of the empty slope.”
Resistance is set in a 1944 where the D-Day landings have failed and the German have invaded Britain. A young woman in a remote Welsh border valley, Sarah, wakes to find her husband gone. She soon discovers that all seven of the men in the valley have disappeared, leaving their wives and children behind, with circumstantial evidence to suggest they’ve become resistance agents (as per real plans laid in 1940). When a small German patrol appears on a mysterious mission and becomes (deliberately) trapped in the valley for winter, the women must come to an accommodation with the enemy to keep their farms running and their sheep alive through the harsh weather.
I admit to a certain impatience with this book for the first third. It is beautifully written by the poet Sheers, to the extent that I was aching with a displaced sort of homesickness for rolling green hills and misty mornings, and the reactions of the women are realistic…which means Sarah and other characters spend a good portion of this part of the book feeling confused, refusing to believe their men aren’t coming back, and missing them terribly. Realistic…kind of dull — and of course, the back cover gives away that that Germans show up, so I was tapping my fingers waiting for them.
When they do appear, the book becomes not so much about resistance as about how easy it is to not resist. We never see what actions the husbands are taking, just the occasional hearsay; the focus is almost entirely on the women in the valley. They do their best to keep the Germans at arm’s length, but they have little choice but to accept their help when the blizzards come. Remote and cut off from all communications, it becomes simpler, almost necessary, for both women and soldiers to forget that there is still a war going on out there beyond the valley walls.
This is no more graphically represented than by the stories the youngest of the women hears when she is sent away for her own safety, the things that could have happened to her but for a slip of fate: Captain Wolfram, commanding officer of the patrol, arrives in the valley brutalised and numb from war — he idly assumes he’ll report the women when he’s done in the valley, as the wives of men obviously gone to resistance and therefore ripe for retaliation through execution, and he just as idly prevents the rape of the women even though he normally wouldn’t have, for no better reason than he doesn’t want his peaceful sojourn disturbed.
Regardless, the winter works on both sets of people and by the thaw, there is a kind of fatalism about them, a kind of resumption of their interrupted lives and an acceptance of the invaders, and for the Germans a gradual relaxing into civilian life, a normalisation, to such an extent that when one of the women decides to leave the valley to visit the main town, both groups accept it, and it is this action that brings the occupation crashing down upon them.
It’s the ending that really caught me with this book, how suddenly it comes and the ambiguity of Sarah’s decision — I know what I think she did, but it’s not spelled out, only strongly implied, so it’s the reader’s interpretation which determines whether it is, after all, an act of resistance or of compliance.
Verdict
A beautifully written, though slow paced, alternate history focusing on the people left behind when others resist. Worth reading if you like those stories of war that are remote from the gore of the front lines but which still protray the brutality of war and the nobility and savagery of people caught up in it.
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