Books That Evoke Time and Place

November 7, 2009 - Penelope Lively says these books excel in depicting a particular time and place

1. The Boys' Crusade. By Paul Fussell. Modern Library, 2003 940.5421 F

In 1944, during the run-up to D-Day, two million young American men were given 17 weeks of basic training and shipped to Europe. Over the course of 11 months, from the Normandy landings to Germany's surrender, 135,000 U.S. infantrymen were killed and half a million wounded. Paul Fussell was among the soldiers who came home. He offers a brief, selective and forceful account of that period in "The Boys' Crusade"— and boys is what they largely were. The jacket of my copy shows the face of what one can only see as a child, swamped by his helmet. The book makes liberal use of eye-witness quotation—one soldier describes finding German corpses, "gray teeth, gray hands, worn boots, no identities . . . dead meat, nothing to grieve," and being "stupefied by the death we'd breathed"—an effect that plunges the reader into specific actions and the day-by-day routines of combat. But "The Boys' Crusade" also evokes the outlook of those teenagers—their blithe fidelity to the idea of America as the best and only modern country in the world, and their rapid exposure to the grim realities of an annihilating war.

2. The Last September. By Elizabeth Bowen. The Dial Press, 1929. FIC Bowen

This early novel by Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) is set in September 1920, at one of the "great houses" of the Anglo-Irish landowning Protestant families in southern Ireland. The central figure is Lois, a teenager staying on the estate, called Danielstown, with her aunt and uncle. There are tennis parties and dances—Lois loves a British officer from the nearby army station. But behind the story of this happy, innocent girl lurks another one: Ireland is in the midst of violent turmoil—guerrilla conflict between Irish rebels and the British troops who garrison the land. There are ambushes, reprisals, figures glimpsed in the darkness, rumors of arms caches. None of this is made explicit; instead, it surfaces in hints and clues that disturb the autumn program of social events. Until, at the end, there is the stark account of what came soon after: "A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness."

3. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. By James Shapiro. HarperCollins, 2005 822.33 Shakespeare S

James Shapiro places Shakespeare and his plays in their historical context, demonstrating how a yearlong burst of creative activity in 1599—"Henry V," "Julius Caesar," "As You Like It," the first draft of "Hamlet"—was prompted and fueled by what was actually happening at the time. England was threatened by Spain and its armada (possibly inspiring the "jittery soldiers" early in "Hamlet"), for instance, and Queen Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Essex, was pursuing a disastrous campaign to put down an Irish insurrection ("Henry V" mentions a general "from Ireland coming, / Bring rebellion broached on his sword"). The aging Elizabeth, with no successor waiting, feared assassination; "Julius Caesar" depicted the murder of a ruler. By finding public concerns reflected in the plays that Shakespeare was writing, Shapiro cunningly carries readers back to a single year and shows an extraordinary mind at work.

4. The Common Stream. By Rowland Parker. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975. 942.0657 P

Rowland Parker's publication of "The Common Stream" more than three decades ago was a pioneering instance of what is now known as micro-history. Parker was not a professional historian; he lived in the village of Foxton in eastern England and became fascinated by the visible presence of the past all around him. He walked, dug, ferreted in archives and eventually produced this remarkable reconstruction of how people had lived in one small part of the world for 2,000 years. The presence of water determined the beginnings of settlement, hence "the common stream" of the book's title. National events intruded on Foxton: A Roman villa was burned down by what we would now call insurgents; the Black Death devastated the area; the English Civil War made partisan demands on the populace. But the village's story is of persons and of families—individual homes traced, their furnishings deduced from the content of wills. In Parker's telling, Foxton springs to life, century by century.

5. The Shorter Pepys. By Samuel Pepys. Penguin Classics, 1993. Biography B Pepys

"Up, and to the office . . ." So far, so 21st century, but Samuel Pepys's office was of course that of the British Navy Board in the 1660s. His expansive, vivid diaries, published in several editions since they first appeared in 1825, are one of the most immediate and valuable accounts that we have of the habits and outlook of the mid-17th century, let alone the habits and outlook of a remarkable man. Pepys was clever, ambitious and wonderfully indiscreet. At one extreme, the diaries are an insight into the operation of the British navy and the labyrinthine politics of the times; at the other, they are a funny and candid portrait of Pepys's own family life, his incessant pursuit of women, his fractious relationship with his young wife. They also provide close-up accounts of the Fire of London and the Great Plague, presenting as well an enthralling picture of what it was like to live through it all as a privileged Londoner.

—Ms. Lively is the author of "Moon Tiger" and other novels. Her latest, "Family Album," has just been published by Viking.