Human Voices
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3.6 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A British radio station struggles through the London blitz, in a “wonderful” novel of World War II England (A.S. Byatt), by a veteran of the BBC.
The nation is listening. It’s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it’s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs are only part of the chaos faced by the staff.
There’s a battle for control between two program directors—one recklessly randy, the other efficient. Their comely assistant is suffering the pangs of unrequited love; an unwed mother is resisting the impending birth of her baby; and an exiled French general takes to the airwaves demanding Britain’s surrender. Then there’s the concert hall itself—a makeshift shelter for the displaced that quickly becomes a hotbed for quick trysts, bloody brawls, private wars between the sexes, political grandstanding, pointless deaths, and overriding fear, as the news unfolds just outside the building’s vulnerable walls.
Inspired by the Booker Prize–winning author’s own wartime experiences at the BBC, Human Voices is a novel at once “funny, touching, and authentic” (Sunday Times, London).
“Made me laugh out loud as I have hardly done since Cold Comfort Farm. It is extraordinary and immensely praiseworthy that a book with such an ultimately serious idea can be so brilliantly funny.” —Country Life
“A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.” —New Criterion
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Now that Fitzgerald has widened her audience here--Blue Flower was published to rave reviews and the 1997 NBCC fiction award--Houghton Mifflin is releasing her early novels in paperback. This gracefully controlled and neatly inlaid chronicle of Britain during WWII, published in England in 1980, reflects the author's wartime experiences with the BBC. The beleaguered broadcasters she portrays have chosen truth over consolation; nevertheless they must try to keep their listeners and themselves from despair as the threat of a German invasion mounts and parachute bombs pit the streets. Yet Sam Brooks, RPD (Recorded Programmes Director), lives in a fantasy world of wax discs and nubile women. When he is not trying desperately to capture the sounds of England (spending hundreds of hours and pounds recording the creak of a country church door), Brooks is crying on the shoulder of one or another of his RPAs (Recorded Programmes Assistants), whose "firmness, and roundness, and readiness to be pleased" give him strength. His seraglio comprises Vi Simmons, cheery, practical, with a man at sea who means to marry her; part-French, pregnant, Lise Bernard, abandoned by her beau; Della, tarty, velvet-voiced, bound for defection to the drama department; and the latecomer, Annie Asra, whose uncompromising candor and fragile susceptibility to emotion reverberates as the real voice of Fitzgerald's book. Annie's fate is to fall in love with Brooks, whom she sees clearly as "a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls" and who is, above all, self-centered, obsessed with his work and oblivious to what goes on around him. Fitzgerald conveys the peculiar intimacy and secrecy of wartime: people disappear from this strange little world very easily and almost without comment, yet, besieged as they are by the fear that England will soon go the way of occupied France, they cling to each other fiercely. Hopelessness is in the air, but, as the BBC employees stay up all night on the late shift, so are strains of Debussy, blunt confessions, murmured condolences and the wails of a baby born in the makeshift bunk room. Fitzgerald's clipped, unsentimental and yet sympathetic irony perfectly describes the moment when the British stiff upper lip begins to tremble in the face of overwhelming historical and emotional events.
