The Lie

Title: The Lie
Author: Helen Dunmore
Published: 2014 by Windmill Books
Genre: Historical drama
Pages: 294




There was a Buy two paperbacks, get one of them half price offer at Gatwick Airport when we were returning from the UK a few months back. The Curious Incident... was one book I got then, and this was the other. I'd seen The Lie in book shops around London and there's plenty of praise on the back and on the inside, so I thought why not. Risk worth taking.


It's 1920, and Daniel has returned to Cornwall from The War. Like many other young men, it has left him broken. Not on the outside, but on the inside. To avoid people, he is living on the lands of an old hermit of a woman who he knew as a child, tending her abandoned garden, milking the goat, gathering the eggs. A simple life. No family left, his best friend lost on the battlefields, Daniel is pretty lost. But no matter how he longs for privacy, the world comes knocking.


The Lie moves along slowly, with Daniel telling us how his days go now, how it was in the war, and how his dead best friend still comes to him, in the night. It's beautifully written and even calm for such a heart-breaking book as it is.

Helen Dunmore has apparently written plenty of books, poems, children's books and short stories, and her books have been widely translated. I'm going to have to read a few more!




I knew he would be at the foot of my bed tonight, and here he is. His head is bowed. His back is turned to me, and he's deep in thought, away by himself in that place where you can never reach even those you know best. That's how I realised what a soul was, when I was young. I'd sung about it in hymns, along with everyone else. I had a soul, I knew that, just as I knew I had a stomach. But it meant nothing until one day I saw my mother sitting in her chair by the unlit fire, her eyes open as if she was looking at the wall opposite. But she wasn't. If I'd made a sound she would have turned and become my mother again. I didn't make a sound. She was away, and I couldn't come to her. I saw something then: loneliness, like a frost that burns your hand when you touch it. I knew she was away, and I couldn't come near without breaking whatever it was that held her. When I first read 'My soul, there is a country/Far beyond the stars...' I knew what it meant. It was about how lonely we all were, trying to come close but something always stopping us, that something inside us that was as far away as the stars. From that time on, when I looked up at the night sky I couldn't feel that the stars were companions. I saw a forest of lights, going away into nowhere. 
   'Frederick,' I say, but he doesn't turn. The frost holds him. Tonight I'm less afraid of him than I've ever been, but farther from him too. He stands and dreams, lost in himself, and my voice doesn't touch him.