Book Review: Requiem for a Wren
Nevil Shute has always been one of my favourite writers, if not my absolute favourite. Every time I pick up one of his books, I know I will be moved. The last of his books I read, ‘On the Beach’, had me sobbing, and then I needed to read several happy books afterwards to abate the aftershocks of that novel. This time around, ‘Requiem for a Wren’ is a different kind of novel with a different kind of melancholic aftertaste. It’s a book full of regret and disappointed hopes that only come in a time of war, that will, inevitably, break your heart.
Alan returns to Australia after several years away in London with the excuse of finishing his law degree and entering the Bar now that the Second World War has ended. Upon returning home, the estate Coombargana is in uproar, and the parlour maid, Jessie Proctor, has committed suicide. No one knows why she killed herself, and who she is is a mystery. What is unusual is that noone by the name of Jessie Proctor entered Australia from England. So who is she? The truth will break Alan’s heart.
The structure of the novel is one of its strengths. We start in the present from the viewpoint of Alan before navigating our way through the past. We learn that Jessie Proctor is really Janet Prentice and had been engaged to his brother Bill during the war. We get flashbacks to Alan’s encounters with Janet and Bill before Bill was killed. From then on, we have to rely on third-party accounts of Janet and Bill and have to trust that they are true. We get a mix of letters and diary entries that relay the story of who Janet is and why she came to her end. What I personally liked about the structure is that Alan is reminiscing, reading and discovering the entire tale over the course of a night, and yet we travel through years after the war through these memories and letters. Like Alan, we all feel different by the end.
We also need to discuss a few bits and pieces from this book, particularly its attitudes to mental health, fate and religion. Janet Prentice, at some point in the novel, shoots down an enemy plane. Yet it turns out to hold seven prisoners of war who escaped from German captivity. As such, she is wracked with guilt and sees the death of Bill as divine justice and continues to do so as people (and her dog Dev) are killed. It is interesting to me that Janet’s subsequent deterioration of her mental health is not treated more kindly, but then again, it was a different time. At some point in the novel, a doctor thinks that her bad mental health is to do with the fact that she is a woman and has no one to look after - in effect, she has no one to do her womanly duties for. Which nowadays would be a load of tosh. I also see Janet’s understanding of mental health is also outdated, being depressed and thinking about divine justice does not make you ‘loony’. The reality is that she is a woman who is carrying a lot of guilt and sadness, which no one has addressed properly.
Nevil Shute has a real knack for storytelling. While I do not think this is his best work (that crown will always go to ‘A Town Like Alice’), it is no less one of his more human and heartbreaking novels. Usually, his works focus on people during war, and rarely does it look at how characters manage after the war, as he says at one point in the book: ‘the war goes on killing even when it’s all over’. I wonder where Shute’s next book will take me.