The past is a foreign, and nearly forgotten, country in Madeleine Bunting’s Island Song, a striking first novel that explores the moral complexities of occupation during the second world war. Its focus is Guernsey, “a miniature English county surrounded by the Atlantic”, once a throwback to an earlier, more genteel age, later the victim of a “model occupation” when the Germans invaded in 1940 and subjugated its natives for five years.
Bunting has designed the novel as a double narrative, alternating deftly between the mid-1990s and the war years, allowing the reader a privileged glimpse into secret alliances and compromises whose meanings only emerge by degrees. Divorced London lawyer Roz has been mourning the death of her beautiful, emotionally distant mother, Helene, when she receives via her solicitor a letter that shivers the family timbers. In it, her late, beloved father, Justin, confesses that she wasn’t his daughter at all; Helene, his wife since 1949, had been previously married as a young woman in Guernsey. It seems that Justin’s professional calamities as an art dealer in the 1960s can be traced back to a desperate compact Helene made during the war.
These tantalising hints of a hitherto unknown life throw Roz for a loop. Old photographs and diaries of life during wartime perplex her. She decides to turn sleuth – under the disapproving glare of one brother and the pale encouragement of another – and sets out for Guernsey in search of her mother’s past. “Could she ennoble it and call it the truth?” Her investigation takes her from gossiping locals who recall the occupation to afternoons of hard slog in the library, where she meets Antoine, a dashing young historian from Paris who’s hunting a missing cache of artworks, including a valuable oil by Cranach. These were probably stolen by the Nazis during their brutal rampage through Europe. Antoine’s research is not merely academic – he wants justice for the Jewish family whose property was looted and, by extension, a reckoning for all those implicated in such crimes. But where does Roz’s mother stand on that spectrum?
Bunting’s detailed, authoritative picture of Guernsey under the jackboot derives from her acclaimed The Model Occupation, a history of the Channel Islands in 1940-45. We get a strong sense of the fearful, half-starved population, abandoned and cut off from the motherland, while their occupiers lord it in relative comfort, enjoying whatever decent food and supplies get through from France. Dark rumours of a slave labour camp emerge from nearby Sark and, as the war turns against the Reich, the deportations to Germany spread terror across the island.
Bunting organises her mosaic of clues in a careful, unshowy prose that only occasionally plods. A character with “a mind as sharp as a razor” requires the cut of a steely editor. She has a habit of presenting sophisticated arguments – about national identity, for instance – within long screeds of dialogue and doesn’t always hear the staginess of it. The book could do with some trimming, particularly in the last hundred pages when Roz’s toing and froing propels her, rather slowly, towards revelation.
And yet Island Song carries a strong tune. Bunting’s imaginative portrait of the young Helene – her struggle with loneliness, her feelings of abandonment – is interestingly ambiguous and moving. In her friendship with a fugitive Russian prisoner and a charming, disaffected German officer, we begin to understand the fateful compromises people make during periods of terrible stress and danger and the likely consequences that ensue when the fog of war starts to clear.
As Antoine wisely puts it: “Self-righteousness is deeply satisfying – and cheap. How many of us can be sure that we wouldn’t have tried to find a way to manage in the war?” The irresolvable mystery of this story, in common with all great fiction, is the human heart.
• Island Song is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
