The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

I wasn't going to bother reviewing this book because there are so many reviews already. I won't re-hash the plot, but here is the lowdown if you are confused by the polarised opinions.

The characters are very well defined despite some complaints about several of them having a similar `voice' in their letters. They are well-defined to the point of caricature. Not entirely unforgivable, Dickens did a lot of this (she's no Dickens). There are probably too many characters and they need distinctive traits but if you look at the five star reviews, people who love the book compare the Islanders to the cast of the Vicar of Dibley and Last of the Summer Wine. This is cited as a compliment. If the Vicar of Dibley makes you chuckle maybe this is the book for you. A lot of the five star reviews come from this camp.

The Vicar of Dibley isn't a bad comparison when you think about it. The book has that Richard Curtis winning combination of humour, warmth and whimsy interspersed with loss and tragedy. Many people love this formula. Other people think it's an insult and a travesty to serve up what happened to the people of Guernsey in the Second World War as light entertainment, albeit with a few tears along the way. Islanders here are patronised as a bunch of eccentrics who could inhabit any small community. There is no sense of a Guernsey identity, just bits of its history served up against a picturesque backdrop. Even the surnames are wrong, like setting a book in rural Ireland where all the characters have made-up Americanised names without a Murphy, Fitzgerald or O'Reilly anywhere on the horizon.

Novels in the form of letters put some people off. This one is a red herring. I think the form is irrelevant if the book is well constructed and good enough in its own right, though there is a view that it's not well constructed but piecemeal and anecdotal.

There are comparisons with Dodie Smith (most likely they mean 'I Capture the Castle' which has a bit of a cult following). This is mostly down to the arch, knowing tone of the upper-middle class female narrator. I always found Dodie Smith over-rated but I seem to be in a minority there.

I am guessing that a fair proportion of the `hate it' reviews come from:

a) People expecting something more literary who found themselves reading a bit of a girly novel with Mills and Boonish qualities.
b) People who hate whimsy and contrived eccentric characters.
c) People annoyed by plot developments which are wildly unlikely or historically inaccurate and similarly object to the grafting of 'acceptable' 21st sensibilities about moral issues on to all the 'good' characters in the book.
d) People who come from or know Guernsey and are enraged by the novel's lack of local authenticity. If I came from Guernsey I would certainly give it 1*. They deserve better.

So where do I stand? Apologies to the population of Guernsey. I am giving it a three star rating, not because it is mediocre in the way that most three star novels are - and not because I am sitting on the fence. I will come clean, I enjoyed it. It was fun and a bit sad. As I got further into it I started to have more and more reservations about its two-dimensional jolly hockey-sticks heroines, salt-of-the-earth heroes, pantomime villains, improbable appearance of Oscar Wilde and other issues discussed above. There's no emotional depth and an easy consensus among the 'good' characters about what constitutes right and wrong, but it presses all the right buttons. I do read serious novels and don't object to bit of light reading among the more worthy stuff though its arguable about whether it's morally right to serve up real, recent-history human suffering in such a superficial `heart warming' way.

Its shortcomings are glaring but I can see why it's become a best seller. So basically: engrossing middle-brow holiday reading but with many elements to make you gnash your teeth if you take it seriously. I would recommend it with those caveats. Buy it for the right person and they will love it. Buy it for the wrong person and you will send them into apoplexy.
PS. I am now going to read The Book of Ebenezer Le Page so it seems some good has come from this

This is a truly delightful book. I worried before it arrived that an amusing and whimsical title might have persuaded me to request something which would turn out not to be very good, but I was wholly wrong. I enjoyed it immensely; it is witty, erudite without being smug, interesting, laugh-out-loud funny in places and very moving in others.

The novel is set in 1946 and is in the form of letters, mainly to and from the central character, Juliet Ashton, a successful writer who becomes, wholly coincidentally, involved with a group of people on Guernsey who lived through the wartime German Occupation. The characters are thoroughly engaging and Mary Ann Shaffer (although born in the USA) manages to capture the English voice of the time beautifully: the prose is a pleasure to read.

It is very hard to summarise any of the developing stories without giving away more than I'd have wanted to know in advance, so I won't try, but the book has something to say about all kinds of things. Among them are friendship, suffering, forgiveness, goodness and wickedness, the resilience of humanity in desperate circumstances, how reading may influence us and the history of the Channel Islanders during the war. All this makes it sound a bit worthy and turgid, but it's neither - anything but, in fact. I never felt that I was being lectured, the history forms a really interesting and beautifully evoked backdrop to a thoroughly involving story and the observations on other things are either implicit in the doings of characters I really cared about or made directly with wit and flair. And there's a really tense will-they-won't-they love story which Jane Austen would have been proud of and which kept me in nail-biting suspense right up to the last page.

One theme in the book is the impact of reading on hitherto unliterary characters, which carries a risk of being patronising or sentimental. Shaffer has a sure feel, though, and avoids both. She does, naturally, use the device to give her views on some of her favourite authors, but it's very wittily and sometimes touchingly done. For example, one of her characters says of Wilfred Owen, "...he knew what was what and called it by its right name. I was there, too, at Passchendaele, and I knew what he knew but I could never put it into words for myself." As a definition of poetry, I think you could do a lot worse than that. And in the same letter there is a paragraph about Yeats's omission of Great War poetry from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse which made me smile and brought a great lump to my throat at the same time.

Another of Shaffer's characters writes, "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That's a very dangerous thing to write in a novel lest it be turned against you, but there is no chance of that here. This is a very good book indeed and I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I was completely carried along by it and when it ended I was very sorry that there was no more. I urge you to read it. I loved it and I'm sure others will too.

Told in epistolary form this book is comparable to 84 Charing Cross Road but also has a charm all of its own. Set in 1946, we meet Juliet, a writer who is searching for inspiration to begin a new book. By a string of coincidences she learns about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and becomes intrigued by them. They all begin writing to each other and sharing snippets of their lives. Some of their wartime tales are of heroics; some of love, some are humorous and some are heartbreaking. Through everything that they endured they became united by a shared passion for books. Although, in fact, the book group was originally just a subterfuge to outwit the German soldiers, but became a reality as a love for books was discovered between them all. The surprise at the end is wonderfully warming and such a delight.

Mary Anne Shaffer has told a story of wartime horrors and hardships, yet kept the tone gentle and just bearable to read, without taking away the awfulness of the Nazi occupation in Guernsey. This book had me entranced from the very beginning and will stay with me for some time to come.