Customer Reviews

Resistance: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an extremely powerful story set in the imagined backdrop of an invaded and Nazi-occupied Britain, from 1944 onwards... an alternative outcome for the Second World War which could quite conceivably have come true. After failed D-Day landings the German invasion begins in earnest on British soil and this story unfolds as the country gradually becomes another occupied territory of the Third Reich - herein lies its power and horror.

One morning, in one of the most remote valleys in the Black Mountains on the English-Welsh border, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Lewis awakes unusually late in the day to find her husband has disappeared. Suspicions are confirmed as all the women in the valley meet to find that all seven men in the valley have literally vanished overnight. The women fear that their husbands have joined an underground resistance group... and they are left to tend their farms, taking on the full heavy workload previously undertaken by the men.

Fear and mistrust envelops them when a German patrol arrives in the valley on an important mission, until an uneasy truce is formed from a mutual need for help during the harsh frozen winter months in this isolated valley of the Black Mountains. The men in the patrol are war-weary and glad of their respite from the fighting; the women are struggling with their workloads.... both sides have a tendency to forget that there is a war on, and this could be a very dangerous thing to forget indeed.

Owen Sheers (also poet) writes in a beautifully lyrical way, vividly bringing to life the Olchon valley. The power of the novel lies in its ability to shock, as the slow realisation gradually dawns that this outcome could have been the one to come true... An idea that stays with you long after turning the last page. I did hestiate before giving it 5 stars because I didn't find it quite as compelling a read in the first half, as in the second; the pace was slightly lacking. However, what it loses in pace it really does make up for in prose and description.

A good read for anyone. I'd especially recommend it for young students of the Second World War, if only to see the Nazi occupation of other European countries in a different light, and perhaps even bring their history more vividly alive.

Perhaps the title is a bit misleading as suggested by NY Times reviewer Jess Row. The book is not so much about "resistance" in the classic WWII thriller mode -- no underground partisan night-fighters, blowing up bridges and rail lines and such -- but rather it is about the concept of resistance and the necessity of acquiescence in the face of tough choices. Sarah and Albrecht, the main characters are sane and lovely people, the kind of intelligent, sensitive human beings you wish all your distant relatives were. The other main characters are, for the most part, farm women neighbors of Sarah, in a remote, harsh, beautiful valley in Wales. Two or three of the 6 German soldiers are actually sensitive normal men. The novel is a fascinating hypothetical scenario of reversed history, the unimaginable German occupation of Britain in 1944.

The most gorgeous and heart-wrenching theme is a loving portrayal of community: sharing, helping, taking risks, sacrificing and giving to one's friends and neighbors during crisis, upheaval and loss. The isolated German soldiers participate fully in the developing communal saga in this tiny, cut-off community with the husband-less women. Not since Arturo Perez-Reverte's powerful women in "The Nautical Chart" and "Queen of the South" have we seen such backbone, ethics and power in fictional female characters.

What makes NOT knowing what happened to loved ones create a tenacious and fanciful set of explanations? Why do some people move quickly to adapt while others languish in the past remembrance? Why is "resistance" commonly thought -- improbably -- to be a masculine trait? The women in this book put a quick end to that idea. Sheers is a really good writer. He blends detailed and graphic narrative with sparse dialogue. He lets a reader see what is not said, and can paint a portrait of, say, a man and woman sitting on a stone wall, feeling the tension between them build. The denouement happens quickly, near the end of the book, by virtue of an idiotic act of vengeance by a minor and weak character, but through his cowardice, Sheers brings the story to a rapid conclusion.

The book jacket is quite misleading and inaccurate. There is no "traditional" love affair between Albrecht and Sarah whatsoever, only the suggestion of it, and there is no sex at all. The 2 principals don't even touch each other for the first 225 pages! What makes "Resistance" a good story? Ordinary people reconciling their hopes and dreams with reality, that's what. The dozen people who populate the story are you and me, down-to-earth and overwhelmed by their sudden, devastating and unwelcome fate.

Other reviewers are partly right: The prose is somewhat clunky, overwritten and overly detailed, and Sheers gets self-aborbed at times in a 2-page aside. There's too much about Bach and other insignificant trivia. Is Sheers a better poet than novelist? It's too early to tell, of course, but if any critic of "Resistance" were to pen his or her first novel as well as Sheers has his first in this story, then there would be little criticism indeed. "Resistance" is a good book, a compelling story. It's hard to put down, easy to pick up, and in the end I really wanted to know what happened to all those who remained behind as well as to Sarah and Albrecht, willing to them success against all odds as they fled. The last lines leave you wanting more.

This is a promising debut novel. It starts with the assumption that the invasion of Normandy failed and that the Germans invaded England. This idea has been done before, but here, rather than a lurid Red Dawn approach, the setting is an isolated valley in Wales. Overnight, all the men of the village (all 7, as I recall) disappear one night, presumably to join a resistance movement, and leaving the women to cope for themselves. The women, who were not informed of the plan by the menfolk, adjust in a variety of ways.

If things had been left at that level, we could have a mostly quiet tale of deeply rural life in Occupied England. But the author also weaves in the story of George, a young man who is recruited for the resistance at the time of the first invasion threat in 1941. Then a German patrol led by Albrecht Wolfram enters the valley on an undisclosed mission. So the story becomes primarily that of the women and the Germans, with perhaps about 10% devoted to George and his leader. Eventually, the reason for the patrol is made clear, but in retrospect the reason seems a little far-fetched: I would have much preferred something simpler, more believable.

The author explains (through Wolfram) why the Normandy invasion failed. I don't think that there was any need to do this: the explanation comes at a time when you've either accepted the basic premise, in which case you don't need an explanation, or else you don't buy the idea, and the explanation doesn't help. Moreover, if you want to look at technical details, the Germans in 1944 lacked the means to carry out an invasion (which also requires huge logistical planning), so that whole aspect should have been left to the imagination and not explained. I am also not comfortable with the mindset that lets the Germans stay in the village rather than rejoining their unit. If Wolfram planned to remain in the village from the start, he certainly picked the right men for the patrol. But there isn't any indication that this was the plan, and in that case I would expect one or more of the Germans to try to return to their regiment rather than stay in the village. So there are some things here which do not feel quite right. But still--it's a quiet story, and the blood and gore of war is mostly remote. I suspect that most authors might try to sex things up--more heroic fighting and sacrifice. But the alternative here works very satisfactorily.

Not only does this book conjure a different and frightful fate for England during WWII, it eerily brings home the confusion of war for both the soldiers and the civilians. The author has created a time and place out of time and out of place. The setting is like a character itself - the beautifully rendered farming village on the English/Welsh border. The reader can feel the breeze, hear the sheep and climb amongst the rocks along with the characters. The first half of the book does move slowly, but that is because the author is meticulously laying his foundation for what is to come. Slowly but surely, as the lives of the German male soldiers and the female civilians merge, so does the line between enemies blur and the reader is left to ponder the inexplicitness of war. There are no real answers here, just a deep and pondering look at the way humans are interdependent, and how that is a good thing. In a race to finish the book, the reader discovers that some of the mysteries are resolved, some aren't - leaving us to do some imagining of our own. A device that insures this story will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

Another fine book with a Welsh theme. Mr Sheers' novel suffers only from being such a heavy read. My edition runs to only 350 pages - but it was by no means an easy journey and every page seemed an achievement in its own right... The almost ponderous feel to this novel comes from the detail in the description. The language is rich - too rich, maybe - but the story is so engrossing I had to keep going. These are finely drawn characters and the "what if" scenario the author presents is challenging and fascinating. A great novel for the fireside in winter, I suggest.

"Resistance" is an alternative history novel, which like Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," and Robert Harris's "Fatherland," transports the reader into a world where the Nazis win WWII. Award-winning author Owen Sheers, however, sets his story in the small Welsh village of Abergavenny, on the edge of the Black Mountains, a rural area quite different from Roth's Newark, NJ, or Harris's Berlin during the Cold War between the United States and Germany.

It is the autumn of 1944. "The D-Day landings have failed, and Russia has fallen. Within a short time, half of Britain is occupied by Germans. Churchill and members of his Cabinet follow King George to Canada." The unthinkable has happened and only small pockets of underground resistance are left to fight the enemy in the UK. America has overstretched her armed forces in the Japanese Theater and US citizens have become increasingly isolationist. They deem the war to be one of European imperialism. Roosevelt loses the election and Dewey becomes president

Against this tumultuous backdrop, the novel begins with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer's wife, who awakens to find Tom, her husband, gone. She has overslept and thinks he is out doing the morning chores. But he is truly gone, leaving Sarah alone, without a word of good-by. During the day she discovers that the handful of women who occupy this farming village are in the same situation. All the men in the Welsh border valley of Olchon have disappeared overnight. They left while their women slept. Because of the remoteness of the village and the men's secrecy, the women knew nothing of the organized resistance, nor are they aware of the latest news. There are no phone lines and they are too deep in the valley for the radio to work. They are aware, however, that London is under siege.

The rugged farm work, which now falls on their shoulders, proves to be overwhelmingly difficult without the help of husbands, sons and brothers. They do manage somewhat, helping each other with the heavy work - tending to the animals, (flocks of sheep, cows, horses, pigs), plowing and seeding the fields, etc.. They are angry that such a secret has been kept from them, leaving them unprepared to cope with the work, their loneliness and their terrible fear. Meanwhile a the bitter winter approaches. The women's only solace is that the Germans would never come to such a small and insignificant valley. They are wrong.

A small German patrol, led by Wehrmacht officer Captain Albrecht Wolfram, arrives in their village on a special mission. Wolfram is a graduate of Oxford who speaks the king's English. He has had enough of war and would like nothing more than to quietly disappear.

The women hate the Germans and the occupation of their homeland, especially when their men are away fighting and, perhaps, even dying. Collaboration is unthinkable. However, the winter is an exceptionally bad one and survival becomes the priority - for both camps. Would it be treason for the women to exchange fresh meat, eggs and milk for physical labor?

The author's prose is frequently poetic, especially when describing the natural world. However, the novel's pace slows occasionally, to a point where the descriptions and subplots distract from the primary storyline. Sheers develops his main characters beautifully, using spare prose to flesh out the stark personalities of the deprived women. And he masterfully creates tension and conflicted loyalties between the characters, which makes for a spellbinding narrative.

Although this theme has been tackled before, "Resistance" is totally original in its characters and scope. It makes for a really good read.
Jana Perskie

Fatherland: A Novel (Mortalis)
The Plot Against America

Although this one is set in Wales rather than Scotland, and after WWII rather than during WWI, this novel reminds me of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song in the dreamy, place-out-of-time atmosphere its author has created.

I'm not a fan of historical fiction, but here, history is just the framework for the story. It's mostly about the characters and the setting...and is an exceptionally moving story, anti-war a subtle way.

If you require a clearly defined ending with all story lines resolved, you probably won't like it.

"Resistance" is a good story about an alternative outcome to the June 6,1944 D-Day invasion where the allies are thrown back into the sea to England, Russia on the Eastern Front collapses which releases tens of thousands of German troops for use in the West in an invasion of England. The author delves into the activiation in mid-1944 of the British plans set up originally after Dunkirk in 1940 when Britian stood alone against Nazi Germany and expected to be invaded. The plans were for the British people to form resistance groups to hassle and harry the invader. Even after WWII ended this was a well kept secret in England for the next several years when finally some of the hideouts and the plans were revealed in magazine articles. A elderly Brit friend still keeps his Sten submachine gun from 1940 hidden away just in case! The story line follows the women left behind on their isolated Wales farms when their husbands all disappear into the hills that summer to form a resistance unit. Their wives were not told they were going or where they were going as that knowledge could be useful to the Nazis who were completing their invasion of Great Britian. A plot line is followed when a six man German unit formerly on the Eastern Front shows up in the valley on a secret mission and over time begin to interact with the women, helping them with their farm work, etc. and both the women and the soldiers find their connection as humans overcoming the barriers of conquerer and conquered. The ending is interesting but I felt that it left the door wide open for a sequel to take up where "Resistance" ends that would follow the characters in now occupied Britain.

All in all a good read that may require you to use a dictionary to find out about some agricultural words used!

Really good alternate history does more than simply speculate about one or two of the limitless "what if" possibilities offered by the past. In the best writing of this type those "what ifs" are just starting points for stories that go well beyond the big picture to consider what the historical changes would mean to ordinary people caught up in their wake. Resistance, Owen Sheens' debut novel, does exactly that, and does it remarkably well.

What if the allied invasion of France had been repelled by a German army fully prepared to meet the invaders on the beaches of Normandy? What if that failed invasion resulted in such a devastating defeat for the Allies that Germany was almost immediately able to land her soldiers on England's southern coast and begin a march to London?

The women of the isolated Olchon Valley of Wales did not even have time to wonder "what if" before they woke up one morning to find that every one of their husbands and sons had vanished, leaving behind nothing to indicate where they had gone or when they might return. But Maggie, oldest of the women, knew in her heart that the men would be gone for a long time when she saw that her husband William had left their cows un-milked, something he had never done in all their years together. She was able to convince the rest of the women that their husbands had joined the resistance, something they hardly dare speak of even among themselves, and that it is their duty to work the farms on their own while their men were away.

And that is exactly what they try to do until a small German patrol suddenly appears in the valley on a mission of its own. Despite the women's efforts to disguise the absence of the valley's men, Captain Albrecht Wolfram quickly reaches the correct conclusion that the women are alone and that their husbands are involved in fighting the German invasion. Albrecht knows that he should report the situation to his superiors but he realizes that, if he does so, everyone in the valley will be killed as an example of what will happen to the families of others who join the underground resistance. Albrecht has already seen the worst that war has to offer and he does not have the stomach to cause the deaths of these innocent women. He, in fact, realizes that his patrol has dropped through the cracks of the German command and decides to keep his men safely in the valley long after their initial mission has been completed.

When harsh winter weather sets in, making it impossible for the soldiers to leave the valley even if they want to, both the women and the soldiers come to realize that they must depend on each other for survival. The women grudgingly reach the conclusion that their resistance is no longer possible. Out of necessity the two groups learn to accommodate each other and over the long winter months personal relationships change to the point that both sides almost forget that they are at war with each other. What they have in common is more important than their differences.

But seasons change, and winter is always followed by spring. Warmer weather opens the valley to the outside world again and the realities of life under a ruthless occupying force. Are the women in more danger from German reprisal or from their neighbors who see them as collaborators? Should they have done more to resist the valley's invaders? What will their husbands think of them? Those are just some of the questions that readers will ponder long after they turn the last page of Resistance.

This one is not to be missed.

Owen Sheers poses a fascinating scenario in Resistance, that of a world bought to its knees by the incredible power and military might of Nazi Germany. Set in the isolated Olchon Valley area of Wales, this novel envisions events in 1944 when the allied troops have failed to halt the advances of the German forces and the enemy has been able to cross the English Channel and invade Britain.

As the German forces steadily advance through the Southern part of the country, moving to surround an embattled yet steadfastly militant London, the members of Olchon Valley farming community here the bad news that has been filtering into the valley every day for the last few weeks. First there are the failed landings in Normandy and then the German counterattack, and the pages of the newspapers dark with the print of casualty lists.

London is swollen with people fleeing north from the coast. Certainly the twenty-seven year old Sarah misses her husband Tom, when she awakes one morning and finds him gone. Now seemly abandoned in a world gone sour, Sarah and other women of the Olchon Valley - Maggie and the fragile Mary Griffiths - embark on an empty vigilance for some sign, some hidden message, their long rides up on the hills forever facing up to a blank answer.

After thirty years of marriage, Maggie had never known her husband William to leave the cows un-milked, but now she knows with a terrible certainty that their husbands had gone and they're not coming back. Even as Mary Griffiths sends out her daughter Bethan on a pony to look, Sarah's is reluctant to accept the story that appears unfolding before them all in the form of a pamphlet, The Countryman's Diary - 1944 and the realization that their husbands had not been who they thought they were.

If the Diary is anything to go by, the men had left the valley because of the invasion that is edging north from the southern coast, to perform their secret duties, to sabotage, to kill. Meanwhile, the seventeen-year-old George Bowen is commissioned by Tommy Atkins and told to spy on the troop movements and the activities of the German home guard.

Aware of the government's plan for a resistance movement in the event of a German invasion, George, if he was willing, could be part of that listening and watching machine, running messages, observing enemy troop movements. The war has certainly transformed England into a different country, the contours of which these women have traced through the newspapers, in radio reports.

But it isn't until a German reconnaissance party arrives in the valley, led by the dashing officer by the name of Albrecht that the women, especially Sarah begins to feel involved and connected in surprising ways. A fluent English speaker, Albrecht forms a hesitant friendship with Sarah, both joined together as fellow subjects of events and not as occupier and occupied.

Settling in with his men "like a wondering band of players, a strangely privileged gang of vagabonds," Albrecht visits Sarah's farmhouse at night with the gramophone, intent to charm her Bach's cello suites. Left to keep the valley's cycle of birth, sowing, harvesting, and slaughter, the women know they have to keep it turning even as the German soldiers eventually come, wading over the fiends, knocking at the doors, and peering though the windows.

Sheers passionately writes of this isolated community, who must keep the home fires burning regardless of the War's outcome and the descriptions of farm life up in the Black Mountains provide some of the most compelling moments of the novel. As the story shuttles between Albrehet's haunting war recollections and Sarah's young life before she married Tom, the author serves up shockingly specific accounts of what might have been had the Americans retreated and left England to its fate.

The strength of Restance lies in the author's fascinating depiction of this British resistance force and his made up backstory: the rumors of the return of the Duke of Windsor, in the wake of the King and Queen sailing for Canada, Britain and Germany standing strong against the capitalist Americans in the West and the Bolsheviks in the East.

Although the pacing is a bit slow, especially in the final third, there is still much to appreciate here, particularly Sheers' poignant and tender-hearted prose in this suspenseful, elegiac, and ultimately life-embracing first novel. Mike Leonard March 08.