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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Together and without them. We carry on, Tha's all we can so, isn't it?", Mar 17 2008
Owen Sheers poses a fascinating scenario in Resistance, that of a world bought to its knees by the incredible power and military might of Nazi Germany. Set in the isolated Olchon Valley area of Wales, this novel envisions events in 1944 when the allied troops have failed to halt the advances of the German forces and the enemy has been able to cross the English Channel and invade Britain.
As the German forces steadily advance through the Southern part of the country, moving to surround an embattled yet steadfastly militant London, the members of Olchon Valley farming community here the bad news that has been filtering into the valley every day for the last few weeks. First there are the failed landings in Normandy and then the German counterattack, and the pages of the newspapers dark with the print of casualty lists.
London is swollen with people fleeing north from the coast. Certainly the twenty-seven year old Sarah misses her husband Tom, when she awakes one morning and finds him gone. Now seemly abandoned in a world gone sour, Sarah and other women of the Olchon Valley - Maggie and the fragile Mary Griffiths - embark on an empty vigilance for some sign, some hidden message, their long rides up on the hills forever facing up to a blank answer.
After thirty years of marriage, Maggie had never known her husband William to leave the cows un-milked, but now she knows with a terrible certainty that their husbands had gone and they're not coming back. Even as Mary Griffiths sends out her daughter Bethan on a pony to look, Sarah's is reluctant to accept the story that appears unfolding before them all in the form of a pamphlet, The Countryman's Diary - 1944 and the realization that their husbands had not been who they thought they were.
If the Diary is anything to go by, the men had left the valley because of the invasion that is edging north from the southern coast, to perform their secret duties, to sabotage, to kill. Meanwhile, the seventeen-year-old George Bowen is commissioned by Tommy Atkins and told to spy on the troop movements and the activities of the German home guard.
Aware of the government's plan for a resistance movement in the event of a German invasion, George, if he was willing, could be part of that listening and watching machine, running messages, observing enemy troop movements. The war has certainly transformed England into a different country, the contours of which these women have traced through the newspapers, in radio reports.
But it isn't until a German reconnaissance party arrives in the valley, led by the dashing officer by the name of Albrecht that the women, especially Sarah begins to feel involved and connected in surprising ways. A fluent English speaker, Albrecht forms a hesitant friendship with Sarah, both joined together as fellow subjects of events and not as occupier and occupied.
Settling in with his men "like a wondering band of players, a strangely privileged gang of vagabonds," Albrecht visits Sarah's farmhouse at night with the gramophone, intent to charm her Bach's cello suites. Left to keep the valley's cycle of birth, sowing, harvesting, and slaughter, the women know they have to keep it turning even as the German soldiers eventually come, wading over the fiends, knocking at the doors, and peering though the windows.
Sheers passionately writes of this isolated community, who must keep the home fires burning regardless of the War's outcome and the descriptions of farm life up in the Black Mountains provide some of the most compelling moments of the novel. As the story shuttles between Albrehet's haunting war recollections and Sarah's young life before she married Tom, the author serves up shockingly specific accounts of what might have been had the Americans retreated and left England to its fate.
The strength of Restance lies in the author's fascinating depiction of this British resistance force and his made up backstory: the rumors of the return of the Duke of Windsor, in the wake of the King and Queen sailing for Canada, Britain and Germany standing strong against the capitalist Americans in the West and the Bolsheviks in the East.
Although the pacing is a bit slow, especially in the final third, there is still much to appreciate here, particularly Sheers' poignant and tender-hearted prose in this suspenseful, elegiac, and ultimately life-embracing first novel. Mike Leonard March 08.
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