Resistance

Author: Owen Sheers

Sheers is a Welsh poet who chose an unlikely topic for his first novel, because it is basically another version of the Germans winning World War Two, an old and tired theme. Yet he managed to make something fresh out of it by concentrating not on the broad politics of the situation but on the human story of those affected. The got the idea when he heard about the "Auxiliary Units", groups of civilians who are trained to go underground and form a resistance should the Germans invade. In his story the D-Day landings fail, the Germans counter-attack and manage to conquer Britain. The story is set in a remote Welsh valley in the Black Mountains where all the men have gone off to join their Auxiliary Units and are supposed dead. This leaves the women behind to look after the farms and cope with the occupying army. It's a harsh life, a struggle to cope even at the best of time and for the women of the valley these are not the best of times. Meanwhile the commander of the German patrol stationed here sees it as a way of keeping his men out of a war that is clearly ending, and the soldiers start dressing in civilian clothes, helping the women rescue sheep caught in the snow, and generally taking the place of the absent men. It is a novel with no villains and no heroes, a novel in which the bleak landscape is one of the leading characters, a story of flawed people trying to find a modicum of peace in a cruel world. Sheers rescues a tired and over-familiar sub-genre by concentrating on the women left behind, and by situating his story so precisely and so viscerally in the rhythms of the farming year. It is the sheer humanity of the story that makes this novel so memorable.