The key turned sweetly in the lock. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the colour of the walls, but the feel of door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one’s palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of coming home.
I couldn’t, in good conscience, squeak this one into the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. It simply isn’t historical fiction. It was written at the time it is set, and besides which – and this will come as a surprise to those who are familiar with the beloved 1942 film adaptation – Mrs. Miniver is not really about World War II. But I had to review it nevertheless, because it’s one of the best books I’ve discovered so far this year, and one of the loveliest pieces of writing you’ll find anywhere.
Mrs. Miniver is not a novel but a collection of short stories, originally published in the Times. I originally supposed that the filmmakers must have drawn different incidents from the stories and woven them together into a plot for the movie, but there is far less connection than that. I’d say they took the characters of the Miniver family and wrote an original story for them. The family is much the same in the book, with the notable exception of oldest son Vin, who is not college-age but in his early teens.
The stories are beautiful little vignettes of daily life, each capturing through Mrs. Miniver’s observant eyes a day, an incident, a moment, in writing that can be savored as she savors each experience. Everyday things become like a simple flower under a magnifying glass, revealing unexpected detail and beauty. As Mrs. Miniver herself muses, “Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion.” When you think about it, that sentence pretty much encapsulates a writer’s task – to craft the net of words that catches thoughts and feelings and display them to the reader; who recognizes them, but may not have been able to put such feelings into words themselves. In Mrs. Miniver author Jan Struther succeeds marvelously at this task.
The imminence of war does make itself felt in the second half of the book, though only the very last chapter is set after war is declared. Under this atmostphere Mrs. Miniver’s ponderings have a slightly bleaker tone in certain stories. Particularly telling, I thought, was a reference to Guy Fawkes’ Day that seemed in sharp contrast to the picture of that celebration in an earlier story. Yet she remains attentive to the beautiful as well as the painful moments of lives lived in difficult times. A passage in the final chapter, which is written in the form of a letter, particularly appealed to me as a student of history, as Mrs. Miniver muses over what it would be like to have ways of exactly recalling people’s feelings and attitudes during momentous events. “The nearest approach to them, I think, are the poems and articles – and even the letters and chance phrases – which are struck out of people like sparks at such moments as this. So write all the letters you can, Susan, please (to me, if you feel like it, but at any rate to somebody), and keep all the ones you get, and put down somewhere, too, everything you see or hear which will help later on to recapture the spirit of this tragic, marvellous, and eye-opening time: so that, having recaptured it, we can use it for better ends.”
This one falls among the number of library books that you wish didn’t have to go back. Highly recommended!