Customer Reviews

After Dunkirk: A Novel

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I have never written a reader review before, but I feel I simply must write to contest the assessment of After Dunkirk, as put forth by the "reader from Brooklyn NYC." After Dunkirk is a treat for those who like to read about people of interesting minds. The writing is "different"--unusual--but beautifully done. It is "elegant"--but in the best sense of the word. It makes the book's characters come alive not just on the page, but in the reader's heart, too. I got to know these people's innermost feelings and thoughts the way I know my own thoughts and emotions. The love story is haunting. After I got into it, I couldn't put this book down. But, as I neared the end, I found that I was "pacing myself"--slowing down--because I didn't want the story to end. I look forward with great anticipation to the next book by this author.

...I LOVED the book! ...There are so many wonderful thingsabout this book, but one of the best is the language! And the factthat English is not the author's native language makes it all the more amazing.

This is not an "easy" book. It requires some attention from the reader. Although Wayne Luthie (the main character) "pulled me in" right in the first few paragraphs, it then took me a little while to get used to the author's unusual style--but not very long. Suddenly, it just hit me: Hey, this is how people really think! This is how my thoughts go inside my own head! And from then on I was completely inside all these people's minds. And they are interesting, flesh-and-blood, and likeable people, facing incredible emotional and physical odds.

Yes, there is a story. It's emotionally involving and moving.

I will not say that this is "the best book I have ever read" ...But I will say that this is one of the most unusual and interesting literary novels I've read in a long time. I hope Ms. McGraw writes many more books, and receives many more grants to help her write them. I'll be waiting.

It's surprising that nobody has commented on the fact that this is a book written by a woman from the point of view of a man (two men, actually), and about a very masculine environment. <Memoirs of a Geisha> was written by a man from the point of view of a woman, and at least partly because of that it got much acclaim and hype.

But this book does is so much better! Unlike in <Geisha>, where I could VERY easily believe that this was a man writing about a woman, in this book I really felt that I was inside a man's head and his thoughts. How come this novel hasn't been promoted more?

And the language is beautiful--truly poetic! An impressive debut.

The "Reader from Brooklyn" (see below) is entitled to his opinion. But he is a puzzle within an enigma: He likes the work of Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient," presumably), but not "After Dunkirk"? For my money, "After Dunkirk" is better by far than "The English Patient"! It's a wonderful book: beautifully written and deeply moving. It is not for everybody: Those who are looking for a "beach read"--or those who like their characters and writing simple and simplistic--please pass by. But as for me, the book's style grabbed me and pulled me right in and took me to the very depths of the characters' minds and souls. "After Dunkirk" would never induce "zzzz's" in this reader!

This beautiful book explores both the actions and thoughts of a small squadron of British fighter pilots at the beginning of WWII. It is written in such a way that the reader in brought completely into the character's lives and shares their experiences and feelings. The author is simply great and I hope her book receives the recognition it justly deserves.

After Dunkirk is a really great book that works on multiple levels, from the broad sweep of the story down to the individual words. At the largest level, it is a unusually powerful examination of the consequences of war, and a portrait of people coming of age under those circumstances. Yet despite the grim subject, it is full of warmth, humor and wit. It is not a bombastic "war is hell" diatribe, but rich and multidimensional. It shows, sometimes with devastating force, the subtle ways in which war and its violence undermine humanity, yet at the same time it shows how people struggle to live through it with their humanity intact, and even grow in the course of it. One could even say that war is the setting but not the only subject. It has a fascinating, likeable protagonist and a beautiful love story. And down to the smallest level, it is poetry--- it is an amazing aesthetic experience with an emotional impact. The protagonist, Flying Officer W! ayne Luthie, describes himself as a man who loves words, and clearly the author does also, using every single word with maximum effect. Music figures prominently in the story (Luthie is a classical music lover, and the woman he falls in love with is a cellist) and the story itself is constructed like a good symphony, structured around large crescendoes and quieter passages. Phrases recur throughout the book as though they were musical themes, repeated until they seem to be magical incantations, their meaning changing each time and undergoing a symphonic development. The style and its effect is not like anything else I've read, and hard to describe. There are some individual paragraphs which hit me with almost a physical force.

The principal character, Flying Officer Wayne Luthie, is a young man who is unwillingly placed in command of a group of even younger men, an inexperienced squadron nicknamed the "Wonders." The narrative alternates between fir! st and third person. In the first person sections, Luthi! e reveals himself through the sometimes fragmented journal and the letters he writes as he lives through the war. Through his writing, Luthie struggles to come to terms with haunting memories from his childhood in India and from his recent captivity in German hands during the time of Dunkirk. We also see him fall in love with a WAAF named N.M. Tunnard-Jones, quickly developing a deep spiritual relationship with her, and struggle with his role as a leader, which has been thrust upon him against his wishes. Luthie is a sensitive character with a brilliant, sometimes brooding mind. Sometimes it is easy to forget that he is barely 21 years old (but sometimes we are reminded.) Luthie's fragmented, turbulent writing draws the reader deeply inside his mind, and it is integral to the way the author tells the story, revealing a little at a time of Luthie's past, building suspense and a sense of foreboding about certain events. The third person sections of the narrative s! how Luthie through the eyes of the men in his command, and show another perspective on the growing relationship between them. Special attention is paid to Ashley, one of the Wonders (whom I took an instant liking to). Ashley's own coming of age experience provides a counterpoint to Luthie's.

I can't possibly describe the whole book, and wouldn't want to. There are so many dimensions to it-- engaging characters, implied commentary on war, humanity, even on writing, and amazing prose that grabs one and draws one in. After Dunkirk is an emotional, intellectual and aesthetic experience. I highly recommend reading it.

I am a professional narrator for the Library of Congress's program of books on tape for the blind, and I narrated After Dunkirk. It is an extraordinary book, particularly--but by no means exclusively--in the way in which it recreates so exactly and realistically the life of Battle of Britain pilots, and life in England,during the period covered by the novel.(I was a young boy in England through that time and so much in the book evoked childhood memories) But much more than that,the book has a high level of emotional content that is enhanced by extremely original narrative techniques, and its cross-cutting of the present and past life of the principal protagonist is wonderfully executed. A fine book by any author--a really extraordinary book as a first novel. Congratulations, Milena McGraw.

AFTER DUNKIRK draws you in from the first sentence. I don't quite know how, but it does. Flying Officer Wayne Luthie, who tells his story in the first person, is a sensitive, likeable person who involves the reader emotionally with ever-increasing intensity. Not quite out of his teens himself when the book begins (though with more experience behind him than most of us would care to have in a lifetime), Luthie finds himself thrust into the position of commanding officer over a squad of even younger, and much greener, fighter pilots.

They train "somewhere in Scotland," and are then transferred south for the real thing: what would become known as the Battle of Britain. We witness firsthand how precarious Britain's position was, with barely trained kids her main defense against the German onslaught as they take to the air several times a day to battle enemy fighters, catching barely a catnap in between "scrambles."

But all this is mainly background to Luthie's inner story, interwoven among the "outer" scenes in the form of diary entries and fragments of letters home. As the battle grows in intensity, so does the inner turmoil revealed, at first reluctantly but finally compulsively, in the diary narrative. Luthie's painful memories of the events that happened earlier when he was shot down over Dunkirk begin as words and snatches of thought that keep intruding upon his consciousness ever more insistently and with increasing detail until the story finally emerges.

One strand of the "outer" story, interwoven with Luthie's diary and the events he and his young charges are living through, is the love that blossoms between Luthie and a WAAF who has also seen too much of life--and death--too soon. The bittersweet, emotional passages of the love story contrast with the relationship that builds between Luthie and his "men." This we see only indirectly through the accumulated observations of one of the men, Sergeant Pilot Ashley, who provides a third-! person point of view as dispassionate and unsentimental as the photographs he is always snapping of the scenes around him. Luthie never learns how his young charges come to feel about him, and the reader learns only near the end through the spontaneous actions of one of them in the harrowing climactic scene.

The book's intensity becomes almost unbearable toward the end, as the rhythm of events and emotions drives us onward like a relentless, accelerating drumbeat.

Milena McGraw is a masterful literary craftswoman. You aren't likely to emerge from AFTER DUNKIRK unaffected.

This exactly the kind of book I would expect to get highly praising reviews. It has all the elements of popular modern literary fiction: a hackneyed, archetypal plot; a melodramatic but overblown love story (what a surprise, the girl has been hurt before); the obligatory loss of love and gaining of redemption; the prose style masquerading as 'elegant' because it is told in a half-hearted stream-of-conscious style, which the author believes gives license to present a story in a fragmented, verbose manner that attempts to conceal glaring weaknesses in plot.

This book is average at best; if you're reading for the WW2 stuff look for Halpert's A Real Good War and if it's for the love story there's really nothing to distinguish this from the thousands of other patently mass-produced love stories cluttering bookstore shelves. Also please do not insult a marvelous writer such as Ondaatje with comparisons to this sentimental drivel.

It is not often that one is driven to write a negative review, two years after having read it.

After Dunkirk inspires one to such an act. To be honest, all that I remember about this book is having to battle through unreadable prose and trying to detect a story line. It could well be that Madame Mcgraw who is Czech is a brilliant writer in her native language. However, even the pliable English language cannot endure such punishment.

I was further shocked to discover that this work was result of a writers grant. I can think of far better uses for valuable artistic resources.

Finally the news got even worse. At the time of reading,Madame McGraw was busily inflicting yet another one of her books on the suffering literary public.