![]() ![]() It’s been done before, and despite the prolific quotations from other people’s poetry, it needs to be done better than this to ‘elevate her into a different league’. ![]() With its avoid-the-issue ending, the plot of The Lie is a bit simplistic, and the novel wears its architecture too noticeably, flickering back and forth between the returned soldier’s flashbacks to the trenches and his musings in the present. ( The Weekend Australian, March 1-2, 2014)īut while I thought The Lie was well written and quite interesting, I didn’t find it as compelling as Barker’s Regeneration (the first of the trilogy) which I read more than a decade ago. Pat Barker matches her for historical accuracy and the ability to delve deep into the human psyche, but Dunmore’s haunting, lyrical and mesmeric prose to describe carnage and loss elevates her into a different league. The Lie by Helen Dunmore, an award-winning British author, tells the evocative story of Daniel Branwell, who has returned to his hometown, idyllic Cornwall, in the far west coast of England, after fighting in the brutal trenches and battlefields of France during the First World War. Malcolm Forbes, who reviewed it for The Australian, thought that: It seems it’s not possible to read The Lie without comparing it to Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, which I think is one of the finest attempts to render the horror of World War I in fiction. Another book from the overflowing D-G TBR shelf! ![]()
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