Anita Shreve’s latest book begins in London, in 1916, when Lily Bridge a kind matron married to a distinguished cranial surgeon, comes upon a woman in great distress. She is ill penniless and dressed in a uniform of the British medical service. She has made her way to from the trenches of World War I in France. She can’t remember anything about herself but is convinced that she must get to the British Admiralty. She is American, on impulse Lily invites her into her home. The name she gives herself is Stella Bain, she cannot remember her own name.
Stella is suffering from shell shock. At this time the ailment was barely heard of. She and Dr Bridge embark on a course of the “talking cure”. Dr Bridge repeatedly takes Stella to the Admiralty, where they sit on benches and wait to recognise someone or be recognised. At their 5th visit she is called by her real name which slams her past back into memory: she is not Stella Bain but Etna Bliss Van Tassel, the wife on an American academic caught up in a nefarious plot. Etna we learn had married Van Tassel to get out of the house she was living in. Van Tassel entangled their young daughter in a plot that eventually separated mother and daughter, and sent Etna to Europe to drive an ambulance in the first World War.
She never loved her husband and he didn’t like that. He entangled their young daughter in a schemed designed to separate mother and daughter. Recovered, Eta returns to America and manages to free her daughter from her father’s plans, and divorces him. Ultimately she returns to England and meets Dr Bridges again.
This novel promises more than it delivers in that it is somewhat fragmented. The issue of Eta’s divorce has disturbed what might have been a better plot, and is written in an over sympathetic style urging the reader to think that this divorce is essential to the narrative and will solve all the problems.
A.D. (Ireland, 2015)