The story of a young family struggling with love and fear in wartime Brighton is bold, clever and reassuringly uncomplicated
May 1940, Brighton, wartime, the constant threat of invasion. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son Philip are struggling to keep their small family together in the most uncertain of times. Geoffrey, a banker, is doing his bit for the war effort as the head of an internment camp, Evelyn is bored and listless and volunteering at the camp, largely against her husband's wishes (although he is too pathetic to stop her).
Philip is lost in his own fear and imagination and has become convinced that Hitler is going to take over the Brighton Pavilion and install his evil henchmen. This apparently was a real rumour at the time.
This is a reassuringly uncomplicated literary novel, and is deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize. It has a natural ease and absence of artifice. It's meticulously researched without showing off about it. It's full of character studies and psychological insights but doesn't shove them down your throat. It's poetic without being pretentious – even though there's a whole Virginia Woolf thread running through it.
MacLeod, a professor of contemporary fiction at the University of Chichester, was raised in Canada and has lived in England since the late 1980s. Unexploded is her third novel. It has an intimacy that drags you in, partly through an intense, claustrophobic portrait of the Beaumonts' marriage. They have ended up together more by accident than design and things have soured between them without either being able to say anything about it. Life became worse when Evelyn had difficulties in childbirth and her doctor made her promise that she would not try to get pregnant again. Then came the war. And that definitely wasn't going to be a time to let the stiff upper lip start wobbling.
As a result Unexploded is full of simmering tension, resentment and unexpressed passion. Geoffrey begins a half-hearted liaison with a prostitute he suspects may be Jewish. He loves her with a tenderness he cannot feel for anyone else. But he cannot bear to be close to her either. There seems a futility to everything Geoffrey undertakes. On the surface, he's a successful man – he has money, ambition, responsibility. But underneath he is morally weak and cowardly, unable to face up to what is really going on. Evelyn, meanwhile, is developing a strange attraction for Otto Gottlieb, a "degenerate" German-Jewish painter in her husband's internment camp.
Evelyn goes to the camp to read to the men to lift their spirits. When one dies, she discovers that Gottlieb had painted a beautiful picture of him. She is bored, lonely and lost, and this artistic gesture of solidarity and respect makes her forget all sense.
Philip, the Beaumonts' son, is beautifully drawn, his chapters seen through his own eyes as he roams the streets with boys that he should not be friends with, and hides in corners where he can listen illicitly to the radio. Philip serves as a way of showing us how frightening things are for the adults: he is bemused (but also terrified) at the prospect of Hitler arriving. The adults cannot bear to think of it. But the prospect of Hitler in the Brighton Pavilion is so extraordinarily real to Philip that it's not so much a question of whether it will happen, but when. His story gives us a window into a more entertaining picture of life during the war: "Father Christmas was not put off by the Luftwaffe."
With its mixture of suspense and wistfulness, Unexploded is original and unusual. I sometimes wished it hadn't been quite so doom-laden from the outset: the reader knows Evelyn is not going to end up in a happy place. But overall this is a bold, cleverly told story from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing. I'd be happy (and not surprised) to see it on the Booker shortlist.
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