Juxtabook

Old Baggage, Crooked Heart, V for Victory is the most charming and moving trilogy. Crooked Heart was written first and this book and the next feature Noel, a small boy becoming a teenager across the books. His parentage is obscure, especially to him, and he is adrift in the world. Piercingly intelligent, he has taught himself a remarkable resilience and is often wiser than the grown-ups around him. Noel’s wisdom is book-learnt though, and he often fails to see how things might apply in the real world. His pointed remarks and ability to cut through polite conventions will make you smile all the way through. He is the most heart-breakingly delightful character.

The above makes the books sound character-led and the charcterisation is just wonderful. The plots, however, are also excellent, especially woven across the three books as they are: clever, detailed, page-turningly plotted.

The books are set in the 1930s and 1940s and the period details are handled just right. Calmly and without fuss and flourish, the Home Front is just in front of us. There is no sense of it being built, no unnecessary cramming in of period details. The characters just live during WWII, and that’s that.

As an evacuee with yet another mother-replacement figure, Noel is silent and clammed-up. Dragged out on escapades with his not entirely honest foster-mother Vera he gradually loosens up as he chips in with advice to improve their success at defrauding the public. An unlikely and hilarious crime duo is born.

Yet, despite the humour, this vulnerable boy and desperately poor mother really start to get to you. You start to root for them to succeed, both separately and together as a family.

Old Baggage, written as prequel to the above two books, mainly focuses on Mattie, a wealthy, practical, forthright, steam-roller of a person. The story asks a question: what should a suffragette do when the cause is won? Where does all that passion and resilience and bravery go? What happens to their unspent energy? What happens to all the experiences and the feelings that went with them – the arrests, the beatings the force-feeding; the fear, the humiliation, the anger? Alongside this trauma these are the women of the first world war. Women who had brothers and fathers and husbands who fought and died or were badly damaged. And the women carry the loss of these men alongside the bruises of the suffrage fight. What baggage indeed.

So we have Mattie and her poigniantly written friend and housemate nicknamed The Flea. We have the girls they help and the love they give. The mistakes they make and the people they hurt along the way and right at the end in walks Noel. A small character who would not have existed were it not for the club that Mattie starts to help girls exercise their minds and their brains so they can use their vote and new freedoms well.

These are books about love and about family, about loneliness and connections. They’re also about duty. All kinds of love – for comrades, country, and cause; for brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, aunts and godsons; romantic love; love for children – your own and other peoples. They are also about responsibility. The duty of care we have for each other, for the nation state, or the village. The way in which we turn up for a cause or each other.

And “turning-up” is what they do in their very different ways: Mattie and The Flea, Ida, Winnie (taken from being a child to becoming senior ARP warden), Noel, Vera, Mr Jepson. So many wonderful small scenes or minor characters wash around the story of Noel and Mattie and Vera coming in and out like the tide. The emotionally true description of the long-time prisoner-of-war’s homecoming as seen through the eyes of Mr Jepson the journalist is one of many little pieces of perfection throughout the books. It is the kind of fleeting scene that makes you put the book down for a second and think, yes, that must be how it had been, for the lucky ones: the survivors and the ones with the power to connect, really properly, with their fellow human beings.

I read the books in chronological story order and I think that’s the best way – starting with Old Baggage which character-wise is the most complex – Mattie is a brilliant creation. Knowing Mattie explains much about Noel’s distinctive personality for the later books. Crooked Heart is the most heart melting and the funniest and V for Victory ties up loose ends from both the other two books beautifully. You’ll want to read them all again once you finish anyway as it is just a wonderful world to be in, a real mental holiday, for the short time it will take you to devour these stories.

Lissa Evans has also written Small Bomb at Timperley (wonderful title and again characterisation that walks right off the page. I hope she revisits the main folk from this story. I so want to read more!) and Their Finest Hour and a Half which I have just started. The latter has been filmed with Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy.

Lissa Evans’ website is here and she is on X and Instagram.