Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah

 

‘People made us think we had done something wrong, the women especially.’

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

On the train home from Norfolk recently, I observed a man reading a book whose title, about spies, intrigued me; also a woman reading this book. I noted both and bought them. The spies thing was a dud and I gave it to the charity bookshop. The Hannah, however, captivated me. Its subject is the women who volunteered as nurses to work in the evacuation hospitals in Vietnam during that other misguided conflict. The experiences she describes – all derived from very broad research, cited at the back of the book - are breathtaking, terrible, near unimaginable.

Whilst this is cast as a novel and therefore at its core an imagined story with relationships lost, broken, betrayed, held to, its fiction follows the best example of show not tell: auditory, visual and emotional encounter, sensory in all aspects – you can smell it, too, the hospital, the clothes they wear, their kitbags - fill out a narrative of soul-searching depth. I cried.

To be remembered, also – and Hannah sheds vital light on this – back in America, a society forever torn by its own inner conflicts, was further assaulted by a new age of self-expression, hippies growing their hair and dropping out…anti-war protest marches, the Gay Liberation movement, Civil Rights…

The chaos and urgency of a Big Push in the hospital when casualties flooded in, brought by Dust-Offs, helicopters, the injuries, the incessant calls of work work work, with little respite, the agonies of death, a nurse holding a dying man’s hand…

The central character, at first a barely trained nurse, is flung into action with a terse ‘you can do this’ from a surgeon who doesn’t want dither, he wants determination, and help right now and the novel draws in stark detail the process through which a tiro becomes an expert often through the sheer propulsion of expectation. There is no time for hesitation, never any time, for, just as on the battlefield some kilometres away, the bullets fly without delay from the pressure on a trigger, so the injury, very often mortal, nevertheless has to be seen to immediately. As a catalogue of how the human heart and moral power are strengthened by this intensely stressful experience, I have read few novels which do it more poignantly. As Hannah shows: torment can lead to compassion, a strength we may not have known lay inside us.

There are lies, misunderstandings, misreports of death and the anguish of love found and snatched away by the imperatives of war and its terrible repercussions – not only on the soldiers of the army, navy and air force, but on the civilians, women and children, the horror of Agent Orange and indiscriminate bombing … the cruelties perpetrated by men dehumanised by conflict.

There is, too, and powerfully exposed, the generation gap and the mutual incomprehension. Thus the father to his volunteer nurse daughter: ‘Your generation, the need to talk, talk, talk…’

Gone the days of put up and shut up. Hannah makes no judgement – that is for the reader. She does lapse occasionally and when a mother makes an emergency call to see her son in hospital, do we really need to know exactly what she is wearing? But it’s s small flaw. Everyone wants a best seller and one thing which is evident in best sellers is the writer’s obsession with detail, detail, detail. Hannah avoids that. She knows her own heart and that emotional sensibility is evident on every page, without show or personal reflection and intervention. She sees, she hears, she brings it all to life, even life teetering on the edge of death.

I have asked American friends about this and their reaction varies, depending on what neighbourhood they live in, but Hannah brings to the surface the way in which returning veterans were reviled, even spat at, called unpatriotic. But veterans were only ever seen as the men. Groups of veterans gathering in therapeutic sessions to talk about the way their psyche unravelled on their return home - nightmares, broken relationships, alienation – were male clubs, women disbarred. As the returning nurse says to one Marine: ‘If you didn’t see a woman in Vietnam, you were lucky because it means you didn’t end up in hospital.’

The Women is published by Macmillan