The Storms of War
by Kate WilliamsPegasus Books, 2015The Storms of War, the second novel from Kate Williams, plants her firmly with Antonia Fraser, Alison Weir, and Carolly Erickson in the ranks of professional popular historians who also write novels. Williams has written very good biographies of the young Queen Victoria and of Horatio Nelson's mistress Emma Hamilton, but The Storms of War, set during the First World War, approaches much closer in time to the subject of her newest nonfiction book, about the young Queen Elizabeth II, and its main plot follows the fortunes of the wealthy de Witt family, starting in the placid summer of 1914 when, as is de rigueur in novels like this, nobody imagines for a moment that things could ever change on the international stage. In this book, it's Rudolf de Witt, the patriarch of the family, who does the honors: “We have left the wars behind, thank God,” he complacently tells another character. “That was last century. Now what is important is the Irish question. It is uppermost in the mind of Mr. Asquith, I am sure.”Yes, of course. And when German-born Rudolf also declares, “I am more English than the English,” echoing the famous sentiments of King George V during the War, readers can know with certainty that he and his family will face the resurgent xenophobia of the war years, although things are going smoothly when the novel opens, with characters constantly telling each other that “things will never change.” The family includes Rudolf, his wife Verena, and their children, daughter Emmeline, eldest son Arthur, younger son Michael, and Celia, the youngest de Witt and the star of The Storms of War, a smart but naive young woman who “rather hoped she would be the type of rich lady intellectual who would have everything done for her, so she could think only of books.” Her mother indulges her daydreams up to a point, although she sternly warns her, “Celia, you have to marry. Women must.” To which Celia has a ready reply:
“Women only need husbands if they have babies,” she said stoutly. Marriage, if you asked her, didn't seem to do much that was good. The King and Queen, of course, were very happy, and her parents, but not many other people seemed to be so content.
What follows when news of a certain assassination in Sarajevo breaks over the world is, Williams' considerable dramatic skills and capacious research notwithstanding, intensely predictable. Each de Witt child goes through very familiar, almost archetypal, period-drama experiences. Michael, for instance, is as much a means for Williams to dramatize the conditions of the trench-furrowed front lines as he is a character in his own right:
He put his head up again. The people at home who thought of the Western Front probably imagined it as something very heroic. Instead, just piles of sandbags, looking for all the world like rubbish dumps, scrubby land in between them dotted with dank puddles filled with bullets, guns and debris, and then the mess of wire on sloppy poles, cows bent over it, farm implements caught up. Jus along from them were the foundations of a bombed house, a bit of wall around what was once a garden. Last night, on lookout, he had spotted one rose bush still straining upward, barely touched by the fighting. Now he could see nothing at all, just smoke and what might have been hundreds of men.
(Michael's also the means by which Williams can work in another well-worn WWI-fiction cliché, involving his sexuality and a little furtive tenderness in foxholes.)Celia also seizes her inner pluck and joins the war against her parents' wishes, and there isn't a single element in the systematic loss of her innocence that experienced readers of historical fiction won't have seen before. In fact, this kind of panoramic WWI-era novel has been written many, many times (most elaborately recently by Ken Follett in enormous first volume of his latest trilogy), and the huge success of the BBC series Downton Abbey isn't by itself sufficient explanation for the fad. The increasing destabilization of the world economy might be a more likely candidate, pumping millennial uncertainty deep into our imaginative groundwater, adding an irresistible resonance to this template of a world teetering on the brink of calamity.Whatever the deeper reason, Williams's efforts here (presented by Pegasus Books with a dust jacket cover lamentably less inviting than the UK version, alas), heartfelt and solid as they are, break no new ground, create no new set-pieces, and, unlike her biographies, offer no insights. This is instead a gaudy and very entertaining dumb-show in which we, as spectators, get the delicious same old stories and read on mainly to discover which of our characters will be the one to roll the bandages under fire, which will be the one to be wounded and psychologically shattered, and where all their disillusionments will be formed and then partially healed. That kind of reading has an undeniable and immense appeal, but unless Williams changes her game significantly, readers will be able to plot out the sequel to The Storms of War themselves.
