Helen Dunmore (2001) Finished: Thursday 16th Jan Recommendation: Guardian 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century)
Set during the Siege of Leningrad in World War Two, this novel is certainly hard-hitting. I’d read another of Dunmore’s novels ‘House of Orphans’ a few years ago and in both she cleverly moulds fictional characters to real historical settings. In The Seige, her descriptions of the struggle against starvation, down to minute detail as the protagonist Anna mentally recounts the food that her and her family have remaining to sustain them through the freezing Russian winter, serve as an important testament to the human suffering of war.
Although the subject matter was disturbing at times, I found this novel very engaging to read and some time off after submitting two long essays meant I spent hours sat at home racing through it. Dunmore’s prose can sometimes become slightly too fanciful and forced for me, but this is easily overlooked as she pulls you into the narrative. The main character Anna remained strangely simultaneously close as the the novel rarely strays from her story, but she also appears reticent to the reader, perhaps a way of conveying the closed mentality of people having to remain insular to themselves and their family to survive. Moments of compassion stray through though, and there is a particularly moving scene where Anna offers to draw her neighbour’s dead baby to ease her grief. All this is overshadowed by the madness of the totalitarian state as in the midst of such desperation and suffering characters still force out strained praises to Stalin and the party leadership. Reading The Siege made me interested to find more about the history that inspired the narrative, and it is a must-read for readers who enjoy historical fiction.
Reading 2020 