How appropriate to read this in the year of the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI. And such a great tribute to the ordinary people - the survivors of the fighting, their families and the people who worked hard to rehabilitate them. This is a really good story, in fact it is several stories really, and centers itself around the power of memory in narrating those stories. Not just the stories we tell each other, but as Oliver Sacks puts it in an opening quote - our 'inner narrative', our own personal story.
Set in 1919, in the city of Mansfield, (very recognisable as Christchurch, NZ), Elizabeth Whitman is a very capable nurse who has worked with injured soldiers, injuries of both physical and mental nature. She has a husband, presumed missing, and a four year old son. She lives with her parents in some sort of limbo zone, unsure of how to proceed with her life. Lucky is one such very damaged soldier who she finds herself assigned to look after and try to discover what, if anything, can be done to fix him. It becomes very quickly apparent that all of his memories prior to a head injury he received while in the trenches have been completely obliterated. Elizabeth realises this fairly quickly, but has considerable trouble convincing Lucky's wife and medical team that this is the problem, and that he is not schizophrenic needing to be locked up.
Alongside the stories of these two people, Elizabeth is narrating to her young son the story of the Virgin and the Whale, the lead character being the Balloonist, supposedly representing the missing husband and father. How else do you explain to a four year old that no one knows where Daddy is. Nothing like a bit of magic.
Yet another story comes out of this. The author himself, also takes on the role of story teller. He opens his novel with the story of how this story came to be. He was approached by the son of Elizabeth, with the very attention getting line, 'My mother fell in love with a man who had no memory'. The author tantalises us with whether this could be true or not, and in the end it does not really matter. Because the story he weaves between the chapters set in 1919 keeps our own thought processes alive and engaged, and the hold that memory has in our own understanding of ourselves.
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