Extreme choices.

Izabela meets Bill when he’s brought to her farm by the Nazis as part of a work team; the Nazis occupy Czechoslovakia but want to keep the industry going and when Izzy’s mother says that yes, they could do with some help on the farm (Izzy’s father and older brother have gone to fight in the resistance) the Nazis bring a couple of British prisoners of war. Izzy falls for Bill fairly quickly as he does her; her English isn’t good (and, to be fair, his Czech is non-existent) but it happens. And then the looks and touches and secret conversations turn into a longing to be together. Izzy makes a tremendous decision; she’ll join Bill and do a runner. The pair do so with Izzy dressed as a boy, hair shorn. It’s against everything in the wartime ‘rules’. Discovery would mean death.

The Prisoner’s Wife is an exhilarating tale of mental strength and deception. Based on a true story and told via a couple of different narratives – Izzy’s and Bill’s, which I’ll expand on in a moment – it provides an at times awful but nevertheless compelling and immersive story that leaves you with a couple of threads untied for a dramatic and meaningful finish.

Starting with the writing, Brookes’ prose is wondrous, fully of imagery and detailing that makes everything easy to picture. Too easy to picture, you might lament, when the horrors arrive, as you know they will. There are many chapters confined to very small places, yet these come alive as much as those of wider scope, owing to Brookes’ skill when it comes to description and, arguably, storytelling in general.

That then supports the earlier notion of immersion; an expansion must be made on narrative. Brookes does something very literary with her narratives. You have the regular choice – as there have been many books that do such by this time – of two narratives split by point of view as to cover both main characters, and a further choice to write one in first person and one in third. So far, so normal. But with Brookes’ story and her inclusion of language as a continual plot thread, the narrative takes on an additional purpose. Izzy’s command of English is slight, and in disguise she must remain mute so that her voice does not betray her. So then Brookes’ first person narrative shows the progression of Izzy’s English comprehension as well as provides the reader a way to know about her when she cannot speak. The latter is perhaps pretty obvious, but the former is particularly interesting for the way and times Brookes chooses to focus on it – at the start Izzy thinks a lot about English but by the end her progression is far more in the subtext. And then you have Bill’s third person narrative – it’s not so focused (he gets dialogue after all) and creates an interesting distance between him and yourself, the reader, where you end up caring far more for Izzy, the person who stands to lose so much more. You may even get irritated with Bill on occasion – he is far from the perfect person in Brookes’ narrative, away from any commentary on his situation as a prisoner of war, and is in fact often eclipsed by the other main (somewhere between main and secondary) characters.

These other characters, then, they must be noted. Staying away from where they are located and who they are exactly as to avoid spoilers, you have Ralph, who becomes very important to Izzy, Max, who is a more quiet, bookish, sort (it’s not major but there’s a book-about-books thread going on here), and Scotty, whose character development you are sure to enjoy. Indeed Brookes develops all three characters, and some others, very well so that the various themes and, certainly, the history we’re looking at here, is relaid all the better. Brookes’ employs every aspect of storytelling in her explanation of the various scenes, showing how everything contributes towards the greater whole in a particularly notable and poignant way.

Necessarily, given the circumstances, the romance is mostly confined to thoughts and certainly the thrill is in the deception. Where romantic thoughts come in they are Izzy’s, understandably. This all said, it’s in Izzy’s thoughts of romance that a fair amount of her character development can be found – she beings very much a young woman, taken up completely by thoughts of Bill and forgetting the world (which is of course really dangerous) and ends up mature beyond her years. Part of this development, which in some ways coexists with the use of language, is in Izzy’s adoption of the persona of the fictional boy she becomes. She starts to think in terms of Algernon Cousins, her secondary identity, which becomes interesting in itself.

Better get to history – I’ve spoken about near everything else at this point! Brookes ups the anti and fools you sometimes into thinking it’s alright (well, alright as alright can be in the situation). You do become somewhat immune to everything after a few chapters – oh, they’re on the run but they’re finding places to sleep… oh a POW camp is scary but there’s an established routine – but the answer to ‘how much worse can it get?’ is, probably (I won’t assume how much you know about the war) ‘worse’, every time. There are some unapologetically realistic authors of wartime fiction – people such as Kristin Harmel with her baby murders, Jennifer Robson with the gas chambers, and Vincent Lamb with things I’m still trying to forget to this day; Brookes is on the same level. This is the war, and you can have a romance and some happier times, but it is still a war.

Two last things of note. Firstly the question of class that is looked at in the novel – it takes a backseat because it’s not as important as… well, the subjects included in the previous paragraph, but Brookes does include a small study of classism in the army through one of her characters and the effects it has on a general level. This happens in a POW camp and in the POW camp we also see – second thing of note – some of the lesser-known tasks given to dissenting prisoners. Brookes spends a good few pages on the subject – it’s yucky. It’s also something this reviewer’s never read about before and she’s read a fair number of wartime novels.

In sum, then, The Prisoner’s Wife is an expertly written, page-turning, novel that will do well on the shelves of any reader of WW2 fiction and historical fiction in general. It has the characters, it has the facts, and it has its romance when the time is right.

Publisher: Century (Penguin)
Pages: 396
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-529-12428-6
First Published: 16th April 2020
Date Reviewed: 29th August 2024