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Their Finest Hour and a Half Paperback – January 1, 2010
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length415 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTransworld (Black Swan)
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2010
- Dimensions7.8 x 5 x 0.98 inches
- ISBN-100552774715
- ISBN-13978-0552774710
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Product details
- Publisher : Transworld (Black Swan) (January 1, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 415 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0552774715
- ISBN-13 : 978-0552774710
- Item Weight : 10.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.8 x 5 x 0.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,285,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,429 in Military Historical Fiction
- #30,815 in War Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Evans credits Norman Longmate's HOW WE LIVED THEN for sparking her interest in the home front in WW2. But she has clearly absorbed a lot of novels, movies, and magazines of the period, for she has got the language and stock types down pat. It is the same seam that Kate Atkinson mined in LIFE AFTER LIFE , the popular literature of my own childhood. Evans has just about as many plot shifts and rapid gear changes as Atkinson, but she uses them for comedy. This is, after all, the world of make-believe: advertising, propaganda, entertainment, what's the difference? And just about anyone can come along and stick their oar in. So the story of two twin girls who stole their father's boat to assist in the rescue at Dunkirk gets made whether the basic facts are true or not. But they have to add a gallant Tommy boyfriend, the rescue of an abandoned French dog, a drunken uncle who nonetheless manages to save the day despite being mortally wounded -- and, oh yes, at the last-minute insistence of the War Office, a handsome American journalist, wished upon the all-Brit Dunkirk in the hopes of persuading the United States to enter the war.
All this is very funny, actually, and the typed sections of screenplay that pepper the pages look pretty authentic. They are the work of a lonely bachelor named Buckley, his colleague Parfitt who supplies the gags, and, increasingly, a twenty-year old girl named Catrin just up from Wales who gets recruited to do the women's dialogue, otherwise known as "slop." Catrin, who has many more resources than first appear, is the nearest thing to a protagonist the book has, and the story is always interesting when she is on screen. But she is only one of a large number of characters, among them an "aging, enormously conceited, moderately talented" (and tiresome) actor, his hard-pressed agent, an unmarried woman who works for Madame Tussaud's and gets roped in to the wardrobe department, and a mild-mannered male virgin in his thirties who somehow becomes military adviser on the film. Of course the large cast of lovable or at least bizarre comic types is also typical for films of this era, as is the addition of a spoonful or two of pathos and a pinch of tragedy to the general comedy, so Evans is right on the money. But I still prefer the tighter focus of her more recent novel.
That given, the book is well written and attempts to give the reader a broad experience of the Blitz in London and the war in the country. I felt it moved quickly enough, but was choppy in that the author shifted from character often and quickly. I found myself wondering if I had met these characters earlier in the story or they had just into play. I'm sure that some of these characters would be more interesting if there was more for them to do.
Thankfully the author avoids the pitfall of trying to give the reader a travelogue of the British countryside. In general the author did not take the advice of her story's head writer. "Lose half."
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Another invented participant in the rescue is Uncle Frank, played by a classic character. Ambrose Hilliard is the very model of a shallow, egotistical has-been actor whose glory days are well in the past. His selfishness is monumental and Bill Nighy probably had a great time playing him in the film version of the book. Throughout all the difficulties and stuff-ups of making the movie is the background of the Blitz and I don’t think it’s ever been so well described. There’s a real sense of the weariness it caused and the doggedness required to get through yet another day. The food privations are spirit-dampening. Brits gamely facing Christmas mince tarts made with turnips for instance. In fact the whole era - from the aging thespians desperate for work to the people working for Madame Tussaud’s to the self righteous wife of the Methodist minister deeply concerned about sexual sinning - is brilliantly evoked. It sounds like a recipe for glumness but it’s anything but. Often, when books are described as laugh out loud funny you’re hard pressed to crack a smile but so diverting are the characters and so clever and droll are many authorial wisecracks that you probably will find yourself chuckling. The humour of jaded people has never been so good. There is one really sad thing that happens that you really wished hadn’t, but that’s life. And war.
a lot of things.

