Never underestimate the elderly.

Archie is waiting in the restaurant of Peter Jones department store for his ninety-something-year-old great aunts to arrive. But then he’s called into a manager’s office: Great Aunt Penny has stolen a figurine from the store and has been caught; Great Aunt Josephine is with her. But Penny’s just an old lady and probably has dementia, right? The store let her off. Archie has some exciting news (these ladies are all about ‘excitements’ be they lunch or a day out) – France has invited them both to accept the Legion d’Honneur for their bravery and service in the Second World War. They’ll go, of course they will. But perhaps Penny’s stealing isn’t a one off – perhaps she’s been stealing throughout her life. Woven around the present day narrative are stories from the sisters’ days in service. Penny working in the FANY and training as a spy, Josephine in the Wrens. And we get the story of Josephine when she came back from Scotland all those years ago, that time when their friend/servant, Connie, gave birth unmarried and in disgrace.

The Excitements, Chrissie Manby’s first novel under the name of C J Wray, is one half very fun romp and one half fascinating WWII detail. Told with a few themes in tow, the novel places a spotlight on a generation of people – I’d argue it does indeed make you take more notice of factual people, not ‘just’ Wray’s two fictional heroines – who are often deemed as being of lossy intelligence, and are undermined in general.

Penny and Josephine are fantastic characters, though I’ll go to bat in saying that Penny is the more awesome for her personality and how she works through bad situations. She does also get more time on the page. Penny’s stand out feature, that can happily be discussed with only a marginal amount of spoilers dropped – because you figure the situation out in chapter one – is her tendency towards thievery. Only jewellery and expensive figurines, mind you, and there is a solid reason behind it, but, to refer back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph, she gets away with it easily because, as her loyal great-nephew points out to the manager of Peter Jones – John Lewis’ flagship store in Sloane Square that has a firm role in this book – she’s starting to get dementia. Poor Archie – he means well and loves his aunts, but even he misses a very obvious trick sometimes.

Elsewhere in Penny’s narrative, or narratives plural, given Wray’s flashbacks to various decades, we see her valiant strides through the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. A girl of her social status and general education wouldn’t have been expected to know much at the start, but Penny’s almost literal kickarse situation involves having been somewhat of an autodidact of W E Fairbairn’s fighting manual which she uses most notably on a date.

In comparison, Josephine’s life has been quieter – she gets through the Women’s Royal Naval Service duties well, and without too much comment given that she does do well, but there’s a secret that haunts her that Wray teases out to reflect Josephine’s trauma. It’s fairly easy for the reader to work out just for the sheer amount of stories we’ve heard about the whole thing by now, but given Wray’s deft work in placing it in the narrative and emphasising it at times it makes sense to do so, it never becomes a case of waiting for the author to get to the point – you’re happy to let it flow naturally.

As to the writing and structure, as mentioned, it’s well thought out. Wray makes use of both the first and third person and includes diary entries and the odd letter. The movements back and forward in time and the way different periods (now; 1940s; 1960s) are dotted about never threaten your comprehension – it’s easy to keep up with what’s happening and the presumed mystery Wray wanted to employ in choosing the non-linear storytelling works.

Of language we’d better bring in the Morse code. Penny and Josephine sometimes use it to communicate and there is hilarity to be had in Archie’s effective broken Morse. The code is brought to the fore towards the end in a very funny way that involves other war-serving nonagenarians that Penny and Josephine aren’t keen on, and a situation of a more criminal kind.

In characterisations further than our intellectually-sound, thieving, kickarse heroines, Archie is a good supportive character. (I can’t quite call him a main character because there’s both a literal difference in age and a big gap in knowledge.) He has his own character progression which involves a jolly scene when he meets a past lover (the comedy grows as the book nears its end) and you get to see inside his head on occasion. Otherwise there is Penny and Josephine’s housekeeper (they don’t use the word ‘carer’) who has a wonderful progression in her own right, and the two other nonagenarians who show up half way through add to the humour – sometimes at their expense (one is always introducing any statement with ‘as an admiral’s daughter…’) and sometimes to outwit Penny and Josephine. And one of them has their own carer who plays a supplementary role.

The Excitements is such a fun book. The sisters’ wish to always have something to look forward to (an excitement) becomes more than they bargained for in a strangely good way and their constant drive for happiness and to always be ‘toujours gai’ (always cheery) becomes a motto within the narrative. If you want some humour with your WW2 fiction – I’d say this book counts as both historical and contemporary – you want this novel.

Publisher: Orion (Hachette)
Pages: 342
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-398-71183-9
First Published: 30th January 2024
Date Reviewed: 8th October 2024