Cover Image: Blasted Things

Blasted Things

Pub Date:   |   Archive Date:

Member Reviews

A beautifully written novel about grief, love, disappointment and hope, set during and after the First World War.

Was this review helpful?

I was sent a copy of Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister to read and review by NetGalley. I love Lesley Glaister’s writing, she really knows her characters and manages to get the reader right inside their heads. No matter what the era that one of her novels is set or who the protagonists are the insight into the human psyche is astonishing. I for one get totally involved in the stories she weaves and this is no exception. Well crafted and emotive this is a story of love, loss, guilt, shame and conscience. A well earned 4 stars, teetering on the brink of 5.

Was this review helpful?

An outstandingly intelligent read. Blasted Things intricate storyline is beautifully written and oozing with wonderfully descriptive, historical detail that submerges you into the book with such accuracy that you are instantly transported to post WW1 Britain. Absolutely loved it.

Was this review helpful?

A thought provoking book bases around the effect the horrors of the Great War had on the people who lived through it and the effects it had on them in their later life.
The story surrounds Clem who was a nurse working on the front seeing all the horrors of maimed and disfigured men and Vincent a soldier who came up through the ranks.
Although Clem was engaged to Denis whilst working on the front she fell in love with a Canadian who was a surgeon. He was the love of her life but sadly he was killed and she returned to her fiancé and married him but following the birth of her son she suffers from depression and fantasises about her first love.
Vincent although he survived the war is disfigured in the face and wears a prosthetic mask on one side of his face. Down on his luck he unable to return to his old job he helps out in a pub in return for food and abed.
A chance meeting between Clem and Vincent has repercussions for both of them that will effect their lives for ever
Brilliant read

Was this review helpful?

This novel starts with Clem giving birth to her son Edgar in 1920. She is married to Dennis, a doctor with a rural practice, and they live in financial comfort with big house and servants. When Clem starts to show signs of post partum psychosis Dennis starts to treat her with powerful sedatives and the day to day care of her son is taken from her. Throughout the novel her mental state will be questioned. Dennis is old fashioned and has strong ideas of the suitable levels of both obedience and behaviour in women and particularly his wife. But Clem is not in agreement with him. It seems that when her younger brother was killed in the war she became a VAD and nursed close to the front line in France. While there, although still apparently engaged to Dennis, she met and became lovers with a Canadian doctor who she planned to marry. She was pregnant by him when he was killed in an artillery attack. Her stillborn daughter continues to haunt her.
Clem will subsequently meet an injured veteran Vince who served in France and who physically reminds her of her lover. He is trying to build a new peacetime life, not too successfully. Attaching himself to an older widow with young son who is the landlady of a local inn. The occasion of Clem’s first meeting with him is after Vince crashes his motorbike. She, thinking that she is responsible, offers to pay for the damage. This leads to a series of letters, meetings, attempts to scam her of more money and finally blatant blackmail.
So it could be said that this novel talks of the various impacts of the First World War on the participants and survivors and how the trauma followed them into peacetime. Not just the frontline military men and nurses but more subtly those who stayed behind. It talks to how people had to adapt during the war, which led to the overthrowing of established routines and “expectations”, but how after the war some wanted old “standards” re-introduced and others wanted to maintain some of the new freedoms. All of this would be complicated by coping with lives disrupted and destabilised in the rapidly developing but extremely serious financial recession that extended the practical difficulties laid down by the war for so many.
Glaister is trying to depict the difficulties of war for frontline nurses and the stresses and traumas that they faced. She then rightly identifies that the damage of the war did not end at armistice. People would be affected, often deeply, for the rest of their lives. Some would survive with compromise others would die early. By trying to meld an unlikely relationship between Clem and Vince – albeit that she tells us that Clem was suffering from grief and psychosis - she set herself a huge challenge of creating a suite of characters that needed to be both sympathetic and believable.
Whether you enjoy this novel, will undoubtedly depend on whether you are convinced by these latter things and whether you can overlook the occasional clunky “wartime” errors and whether you believe the basic hypothesis that grief could lead Clem to her behaviour depicted – and indeed her route out. I confess that I found some of her storylines and characters too blatantly “thematic” or “issue based” to relax into the general story around them. As a result I didn’t find this one the best of her novels.

Was this review helpful?

★ 1.5 stars

I've not read Lesley Glaister before and I was drawn to BLASTED THINGS for it's premise which promised something a little different to what I was actually expecting. As a historical fiction fan, I had expected a lovely easy read set during and after the Great War. A love story? Or something of a saga, maybe? But that's not what BLASTED THINGS is about.

In fact, what is IS about, beyond Clementine and Vincent and their dangerous liaison, is an exploration into the damage left behind after the war. Clementine and Vincent are products of such an horrific time, yet each suffer differently.

Clementine was a VAD nurse in France during the war where she worked alongside fellow nurses Iris and Gwen, under the watchful eye of Sister Fitch. After the death of her brother Ralph, Clementine trained for the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse and, against her pompous fiance's wishes, went to France to serve in a field hospital. There she met Canadian surgeon Powell Bonneville and fell in love. He asked her to marry him, returning also to Canada with him when the time came. But just as he was about to leave and the field hospital was packing up to move five miles further out of harms way, a shell landed in their midst...killing Powell instantly as well as her dear friend Iris. Only she, Gwen and Sister Fitch survived, with Clem secretly miscarrying whilst recuperating.

She returned home to Blighty to marry her fiance Dennis Everett, a doctor no less, but a pompous, condescending, patronising fool. She bore him a son they named Edgar...though I doubt Clem had much say in the naming as she was too busy reliving and mourning the loss of Powell and their baby all over again. Being a doctor, Dennis knew how to treat her and she spent the next few weeks or so in a haze of injections and medications and, I fear, her marital duties.

On a visit to her widowed sister-in-law Harri and after a show of Dennis patronising her, Clem managed to escape for some fresh air and a walk. While on this walk, she stepped out into the road as a motorbike came around the corner and swerved to miss her...and ultimately crashing. Filled with a sense of guilt, Clem feels she must visit the poor chap in hospital but Dennis cannot see the logic. However she is is insistent and he acquiesces...though protesting loudly and often.

And so Clem meets Vincent Fortune, ex-sergeant, but the war left him changed. He is now so physically damaged that he wears a prosthetic mask covering one side of his face and an unseeing glass eye. Dennis thinks this is the end of it but he couldn't be more wrong. Clem insists on paying for the damage to Vincent's prized possession - his Norton motorcycle - which Vincent milks for all it's worth.

The two continue to meet clandestinely, looking for something in the other that neither can provide, leading them something far more dangerous. And while Vincent may seem like something of a "villain", the reality is his unravelling through no fault of his own. The war left many people changed and damaged...and Vincent was but one of its living casualties.

BLASTED THINGS was nothing like I expected it to be so therefore I was disappointed. I didn't want an exploration into the damage of war or those of the limited choices of a woman caught in a loveless marriage. I wanted a light easy read that I so love about historical fiction. This was too heavy for me and not to my taste at all.

The writing, whilst powerful, was at times rather uncomfortable. In the end, I could not finish this book so I have no idea how it all panned out. But from what I did read, it couldn't have ended well.

While it may not have been to my taste, BLASTED THINGS will certainly appeal to many others, I'm sure. I just don't think I was the right kind of audience.

I would like to thank #LesleyGlaister, #NetGalley and #SandstonePress for an ARC of #BlastedThings in exchange for an honest review.

Was this review helpful?

Blasted Things is another fabulous Lesley Glaister novel. She just keeps getting better and better - and every book is different and differently wonderful.

Others have outlined the story of Clem and Dennis, Powell and Vincent, not to mention Harri and Gwen and all the other beautifully delineated characters. There is passion and quiet love, sadness and joy, betrayal and fidelity. It's all here - the horror of war and death, of illusions and a kind of madness, of loss and love and fantasy, and of quiet home life that can seem tedious in comparison. The descriptions are immediate and powerful and give a great sense of time and place. The thoughts and feelings of Vincent at the end are powerfully done.

Can't recommend it enough.

Thank you!

Was this review helpful?

Much underrated writer Lesley Glaister has set her most recent novel just after WWI.
Clem joins the VAD after her brother is killed in the war. Caught up in the horrors of work at a clearing station close to the Front Line, she has little time to dwell on her fiancé who has rebuffed her when she went against his wishes and volunteers overseas. Unexpectedly, she finds true love in the form of a Canadian Doctor at the station, but not for long.
Returning home, now married to the fiancé, she meets Vincent. He has suffered dreadful facial injuries and having served his country, now faces a future as an outcast. Both Clem and Vincent look for something in the other that neither can provide, and their desperation leads them dangerous measures.
Blasted Things is a moving study of the limited choices of a woman in a middle class, loveless marriage to an emotionally harmless man, but one who has control over every aspect of her life. Caught up by his efforts to use Clem to alleviate his own lack of prospects, Vincent has no idea of how little power she actually possesses to help him, but he doesn’t really care.
This descriptive writing is powerful, and uncomfortable as the meetings between the two become harder to bear and a tragic conclusion seems inevitable.
Thank you to Netgalley and Sandstone Press for the chance to read it.

Was this review helpful?

Thanks to netgalley for this book ~
It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a decent ww1 book. And here we are, at last! The story is believable, and the characters one can relate to. Especially due to the circumstances they face. The only thing I will criticise is that VADs weren’t allowed in Clearing Stations, I think there was only one incredibly rare situation where that happened. But the general rule was no VADs in a C.C.S. But hey, it’s fiction.
Anyway, I give this a 4 out of 5. A book worthy of the WW1 genre!

Was this review helpful?

Thank you to Netgalley, Sandstone Press and Lesley Glaister for this ARC in return for my honest review. Well written characters, well crafted story, well researched.

Was this review helpful?

Read all of Lesley Glaisters novel, loved them all, everyone so different.
This one is about the effects of WWI on different people. The horrors of hospitals on the front line, amputations, brief romances, death and despair.
How can people make a life after their experiences. Two such people are Clementine and Vincent, whose chance meeting leads to unforeseen events and tragedy. Clementine battles against the restrictions imposed on married women, whilst her suffragette sister-in-law relishes her freedom. Vincent is disfigured and will do anything to get the woman he is besotted with..
Lots of historical detail and good characterisation.

Was this review helpful?

An absorbing, beautifully written book that stays with you long after the reading is finished. The story centres on a very young nurse working in a field hospital in Flanders during the Great War. She sees, hears, smells and lives things that cannot help but stay with her forever, and affect the relationships she forms after the war is over. The story is darkly gripping, but has an appealing innocence too, along with an underlying tension throughout that keeps the reader engaged. All the characters are realistically drawn and make themselves visible to the reader - to my mind the mark of a very fine writer indeed.

Was this review helpful?

On finishing a Lesley Glaister novel, I’m always surprised that she’s not usually spoken of in the same breath as some of our foremost British novelists. Not only can she plot a gripping story but her choice of language is always so apt, her characters so real and her narrative so memorable.
In ‘Blasted Things’ Glaister goes back to the early twentieth century to focus on the scars, both physical and mental, borne by those who have been caught up in the ceaseless death and destruction of the First World War. Between them Vincent and Clementine, the central characters in her novel, have experienced terrible loss: of lover; of identity; of place in the world. This suffering makes them vulnerable to rash decisions and misunderstandings which have fatal consequences.
From the outset, the reader feels for Clem. Having lost Powell, a Canadian surgeon and the love of her life in France where she served as a field auxiliary nurse, she returns home to marry her respectable doctor fiancé, Dennis. The latter is condescending, controlling and patronising – a product of his age, his old-fashioned ways perhaps exacerbated by the fact that he fought the war by working in a hospital ‘at home’. Constrained, with a baby she finds hard to love, she meets Vincent and, strangely, there is something about him of Powell that draws her to him.
Vincent, a former door to door salesman who rose to the position of sergeant in the army, is so physically damaged by the war that he wears a prosthetic mask covering one side of his face. Reading Clem as a soft touch, he accepts her offer of payment for his motorbike repair. After all, she caused the accident, didn’t she? Nevertheless, this is not the end of their financial association and the pair meet clandestinely on several occasions. Whilst it would be easy to make Vincent into a pantomime villain, Glaister gives us a much more nuanced portrayal of a man unravelling through no fault of his own. In 1920s England, he is an unwanted reminder of the damage caused by war.
This is a very moving novel. Glaister explores why vulnerable people tell themselves the stories they do. She reminds the reader of the constraints and constrictions women of all classes faced in the early twentieth century, seen in proprietorial terms even by those who love them. She writes of the aspirations that war kills and the corrosive secrets that damage the possibility of a bright future. Whilst many of the characters are flawed, there are no easy judgements to be made. At the end of the novel, whilst Clem’s paper boats may drift calmly away downstream, the reader understands that her future is unlikely to be so tranquil.
My thanks to NetGalley and Sandstone Press for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

Was this review helpful?