Peace, Perfect Peace

 

Peace, Perfect Peace / Josephine Kamm
London: Dean Street Press, 2019, c1947.
206 p.

Now for the last of my Dean Street Press streak! This was a shorter read than some other titles in this series, and appealed to me because of its setting, immediately post-war with evidence of wartime still all around. 

This was the most interesting part of the book, for me - the descriptions of rusting barbwire entanglements on the beaches, the shortage of housing which necessitates the main characters taking a flat in poor repair, constant dust from bombed sites, rationing in food and in clothing (there are difficulties buying a dress and the main character has to settle for what's available). 

The storyline focuses on the Smallwood family. Frances is returning from her service with the ATS, and her husband should be coming back from his wartime service soon as well. She is going to retrieve her children from her mother-in-law Joanna's country house, where they've lived for the last five years. Joanna is loath to let them go, feeling that only she really understands them, particularly the boy Giles. 

There are struggles between Joanna and Frances over the two children, albeit mostly unspoken ones. Frances believes Joanna is trying to alienate her children, but nobody really believes her. Meanwhile, Clare, a friend of Joanna's, is stuck in the middle of this struggle, getting confidences from both sides. Clare, however, is more focused on her own life - romantic difficulties, and the agony of not being able to finish her second novel. 

I loved the setting and some of the elements of the story. But overall, I found it bland, with tiresome characters and an overreliance on the psychological elements of the story. It's trying to show the disruptions that the end of the war caused, specifically for women, but the characters are not engaging and I didn't really care whether Clare wrote a book or not, or the Smallwood family reconnected or not. The plot was thin and slow moving, and Clare just floats through the book, with nothing actually happening to her, and nothing resolved. The Smallwood issues are resolved as Frances' husband comes home and after some fuss, believes her and regathers their children into their small family unit, as is right -- this insistence on the small nuclear family to the exclusion of a wider inclusion of grandparents or friends also felt retrograde. 

So unfortunately this one wasn't really a match for me. I finished it to find out what was going to happen to the family, but I didn't love this one.