REVIEW: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

TITLE: The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
AUTHOR: Mary Ann Shaffer
PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin, 83 Alexander St. Crows Nest, NSW 2065,
Australia. (Bloomsbury) (August 2008)
ISBN: 978 1 74175 168 0 PRICE: A$ 29.95 (Hardback) 255 pages

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).
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It was the pig that started it. The Guernsey Literary Society, I mean. But to
tell you about that would spoil a good tale. Anyway, it was really a letter
that started Juliet Ashton's story and brought her to the story of the pig.

Juliet is a writer living in post-war London with food rationing, bombed
buildings and her own gloom at being unable to find an inspiring topic for a
new book. A letter from an unknown man in Guernsey, who has acquired a book
Juliet once owned, sparks a correspondence which changes all this. And it's all
because of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the very odd
title of which catches Juliet's interest (as it did mine) and draws her into
the lives of a group of islanders who are as unusual as their reading group.

Guernsey is one of the British Channel Islands, a group of small islands which
lie in the English Channel closer to the coast of France than to England.
War-time occupation of the island by the Germans was, it seems, one reason that
the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into existence. And as Juliet's
correspondence with various members of that group grows she learns much about
their lives during the Occupation. Most of all, however, she discovers a group
of people whose personalities shine through their letters, and inevitably she
feels that she has to meet them and learn more about them. Here, after all, may
be material for her next book. It certainly provided material for Mary Anne
Shaffer who charts Juliet's life and progress through her letters and those of
her various correspondents.

The epistolary style is notoriously difficult to bring off successfully, but
Mary Ann Shaffer has done it exceptionally well, especially since this is her
first book and she was over 70 when she began to write it. Especially, too, as
she has woven together several different stories in these letters. Alongside
letters from Juliet and her new island friends, are letters to and from her
publisher, his sister Sophie (a long-time friend of Juliet's), and another,
American, publisher who has suddenly appeared in Juliet's life and is courting
her lavishly. Juliet's bubbly personality and her wry view of life, which had
made her war-time newspaper column Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War, so popular,
fill her letters, and we gradually learn a lot about her, too.

The islanders' letters and they themselves, when Juliet eventually meets them,
are eccentric and full of interest. Their stories of war-time deprivation and
of various things which happened on the island are grim and sometimes
horrifying, but their resilience, courage and love are readily apparent. Juliet
gradually becomes more involved in their lives, and she is particularly
interested in their memories of Elizabeth, the accidental founder of their
group, and of her arrest and imprisonment in Germany for helping one of the
Polish slave workers on the island. This becomes the core of Juliet's
book-research, and no-one knows, in this immediately post-war period, whether
Elizabeth is still alive and will return to the island to be reunited with her
small daughter Kit.

The harsh reality of the islanders' war-time experiences adds to the
uncertainly about Elizabeth's return, but dark as these memories of the past
are, the growing friendship between Juliet and Kit, and with other members of
the group, fills the book with light. Mary Ann Shaffer's book is not gloomy
reading. By the end, one might be forgiven for thinking that Guernsey is
peopled with eccentric herbalists making witchy potions, amiable alcoholics
drinking their way through their former employer's wine cellar, starchy
matrons, and fishermen who concoct bizarrely inventive meals, all of whom write
unusually interesting letters, but since we only meet a handful of the 1400, or
so, inhabitants we could well be mistaken.

So, in spite of its title, this book is not 'just another cookery book', or
even 'just another book-group novel'. In spite of some dark subject matter and
some harrowing and very realistic moments, it turns out in the end to be an
enjoyable and most unusual love story.

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Copyright © Ann Skea 2008