Maybe Helen Dunmore is too prolific. Published and praised in 15 countries for her elegantly crafted books—seven novels, 11 books for children, six volumes of poetry and two short story collections—the British writer has hovered just below the radar here both in name recognition and on bestseller charts. Despite uniformly positive reviews for her adult fiction, novels that are inadequately described as psychological thrillers (they are actually sensitive character studies of human beings stressed to the limit by overwhelming secrets), she has yet to achieve a wide American audience.
Her new novel should change all that.
The Siege, out this month from Grove, takes place in 1941 Leningrad, during the famous war of attrition waged by the Nazi army. The encircled city, deprived of food, electric power and fuel, struggled to remain alive. More than 750,000 people died of starvation, bitter cold, lack of medical supplies and German bombardments. Dunmore's narrative captures the mood, atmosphere and zeitgeist as well as the domestic privations that one family endures, while simultaneously evoking a panorama of epic suffering and heroism. At the same time, she also tenderly, almost dreamily, develops love stories involving two generations. The work at once illuminates a watershed historical event and depicts the nuances of intimacy.
Reached by phone in Bristol, Dunmore projects a warm and outgoing personality somewhat surprising in a writer whose adult fiction exudes a febrile sense of menace. Not surprisingly, however, she sees The Siege as less a departure for her than an extension of her scrutiny of human nature. "I'm very interested in writing about people under pressure," she says.
She refers to Sept. 11 and the shock that reverberated when a seemingly impregnable city was attacked. "I think we have an expectation that civil society is quite fragile, but often it turns out that society is capable of a huge effort in order to preserve the whole. What history shows is that people often do survive, and their resilience was quite miraculous." The decisions people make that enable them to survive is the theme that also permeates her previous novels, which focus on personal and domestic crises. What renders Dunmore's work distinctive is her ability to expose the shifting fault lines of human frailty. Her spare, sensuous prose is so finely attuned to qualities of taste and smell, and to landscape and weather, that each acquires a nearly palpable presence. In The Siege, weather is almost a character. The bone-chilling Russian winter is an instrument of death; haunting images of debilitated bodies in a frozen world are etched with the delicacy of ice on a windowpane.
Previously, Dunmore has evoked oppressive summer weather in Talking to the Dead and With Your Crooked Heart, the foggy mists of a seaside village in Your Blue-eyed Boy and the stark, frozen world of rural turn-of-the-century England in her 1995 Orange Prize—winning novel, A Spell of Winter, which Grove published here last year and has just issued in paperback. A poetic sensibility permeates all her fiction; it's to be expected, since she began her career as a poet.
Before that, she was a teacher, and in the serendipitous way that random experience often awakens a recognition in the soul, her first job upon graduation from York University in 1973 was in Finland. She loved the place. The landscape is very similar to that of Russia, she says, and the behavior it engenders is identical. The isolation of Russian families during the winter of 1941 multiplied the misery of their suffering. Yet, Dunmore stresses, people continued to write and play music and tap inner resources. "There's something about that resilience, that essential humanity, that I find fascinating," she says.
To research The Siege she went to Russia, accessing the reams of information from people who left records and memoirs of that time, and interviewed survivors. "It hasn't moved beyond memory yet," she says, an important factor in capturing the experience. At 49, Dunmore is too young to remember the German blitz, but it's part of her frame of reference, and she knows that the Leningraders' stoic resolve enabled the British nation to survive. "Essentially, The Siege is a story about how our culture survived."
Like all good novelists, Dunmore imbues the narrative with characters whose reality establishes emotional intensity. Even before the war erupts, the heroine, Anna Levin, is stoic and resilient. She's principal caretaker for her five-year-old brother and her increasingly debilitated father, a widowed writer whose work is rejected by the Writers' Union. As her world is plunged into crisis, she copes from day to day. Anna joins the civilian crew frantically building defenses; she forages for food and fuel; she helps put terrified children on evacuation trains. "I don't want to write about history as if the characters know what's going to happen. I want it to be that living, breathing moment, preoccupied with domestic minutiae."
The circumstances of The Siege pervaded Dunmore's inner life far longer than any of her previous books. She's "heartened" that it's been shortlisted for the Whitbread. Genre dexterity allowed her to segue into another children's book (she's published here and in Britain by Scholastic), and she's just now feeling her way into a new novel. She credits her agent, Caranoc King, for bringing her books to Elizabeth Schmitz at Grove after Frederica Freedman, who published Your Blue-eyed Boy and With Your Crooked Heart, left Little, Brown.
Meanwhile, Dunmore leads a settled domestic life in Bristol. Her husband is a lawyer, and there are two sons in their 20s and a seven -year-old daughter. One probes in vain for the tragic complexities that permeate her fiction. Ever concise, Dunmore quotes D.H. Lawrence: "Never trust the teller; trust the tale."
