The Clouds Above: A Novel of Love and War

Rating:
Summary: Not an ordinary love story
Review: I found this book in Scotland last fall with the title "That Summer", so I wasn't aware that it was available in the US.
The story is a bit slow to get started. It isn't clear at first that we have two narrator/characters plus an omniscient narrator. I set the book done several times before it finally gripped me & I had to finish it in the middle of the night.

Greig tries to make us understand what it was like to live with uncertainty, fear, love, & death from moment to moment. The characters seem to be discovering themselves as we watch. Len & Stella examine every feeling as it occurs. This may sound tedious, but it illuminates what I find most interesting about WWII. I want to understand how people felt, how life looked to them. I am not interested in planes or tactics, although I understand that many are. Far more interesting to me are the secrets of the human heart. WWII, and the Battle of Britain in this story, brought out the best & the worst in people. Len & Stella confront the hate, love, grief, & joy that is part of life. They find their love for each other as they learn to face all these emotions.
"The Clouds Above" is like a tightrope act. Will the characters survive? They face danger all the way as we hope & pray that they will make it to the other side.

Rating:
Summary: Not an ordinary love story
Review: I found this book in Scotland last fall with the title "That Summer", so I wasn't aware that it was available in the US.
The story is a bit slow to get started. It isn't clear at first that we have two narrator/characters plus an omniscient narrator. I set the book done several times before it finally gripped me & I had to finish it in the middle of the night.

Greig tries to make us understand what it was like to live with uncertainty, fear, love, & death from moment to moment. The characters seem to be discovering themselves as we watch. Len & Stella examine every feeling as it occurs. This may sound tedious, but it illuminates what I find most interesting about WWII. I want to understand how people felt, how life looked to them. I am not interested in planes or tactics, although I understand that many are. Far more interesting to me are the secrets of the human heart. WWII, and the Battle of Britain in this story, brought out the best & the worst in people. Len & Stella confront the hate, love, grief, & joy that is part of life. They find their love for each other as they learn to face all these emotions.
"The Clouds Above" is like a tightrope act. Will the characters survive? They face danger all the way as we hope & pray that they will make it to the other side.

Rating:
Summary: Makes the past come alive
Review: I love World War II history. Somehow from the depths of hell and the jaws of death, there seem to be magical, romantic times and this book has it all.

The most fascinating thing about the book was being able to get into the heads of the two main characters. We are with Len as he climbs into the desolute back country of Scotland, alone with him and his thoughts while a war is being fought hundreds of miles from where he is.

You can clearly see the strength of the British people over and over in the pilots' determination to fly many sorties each day, see their friends killed and go back and do the same thing the next day.

After Sept. 11, I am convinced that we too might be able to go shopping in Oxford street while another part of London was being bombed. Of course, your heart would not be in it, but showing courage and determination was just a big a part of defeating the enemy as were the Spitfires and Hurricanes.

For anyone who loves history and romance and the dramatic times of the 1940's, this book is a must read. When you are finished you better understand the words of Winston Churchill when he said " that never in the course of history have so many owed so much to so few."

Rating:
Summary: Makes the past come alive
Review: I love World War II history. Somehow from the depths of hell and the jaws of death, there seem to be magical, romantic times and this book has it all.

The most fascinating thing about the book was being able to get into the heads of the two main characters. We are with Len as he climbs into the desolute back country of Scotland, alone with him and his thoughts while a war is being fought hundreds of miles from where he is.

You can clearly see the strength of the British people over and over in the pilots' determination to fly many sorties each day, see their friends killed and go back and do the same thing the next day.

After Sept. 11, I am convinced that we too might be able to go shopping in Oxford street while another part of London was being bombed. Of course, your heart would not be in it, but showing courage and determination was just a big a part of defeating the enemy as were the Spitfires and Hurricanes.

For anyone who loves history and romance and the dramatic times of the 1940's, this book is a must read. When you are finished you better understand the words of Winston Churchill when he said " that never in the course of history have so many owed so much to so few."

Rating:
Summary: World War II Romance Is Magical...
Review: I loved this book!! I read it in two days flat. It embodied everything I love in a good novel, set in 1940's England during WW II. Len and Stella come from different backgrounds, but prove that they can overcome this and even war...for a time. There are some sad parts in the book and the flying/dogfight sequences are very real and scary! This novel reminded me of my own love affair with a military man during wartime and made me shed some tears...it's a must-read, especially for anyone who loves wartime England.

Rating:
Summary: World War II Romance Is Magical...
Review: I loved this book!! I read it in two days flat. It embodied everything I love in a good novel, set in 1940's England during WW II. Len and Stella come from different backgrounds, but prove that they can overcome this and even war...for a time. There are some sad parts in the book and the flying/dogfight sequences are very real and scary! This novel reminded me of my own love affair with a military man during wartime and made me shed some tears...it's a must-read, especially for anyone who loves wartime England.

Rating:
Summary: This glorious book will break your heart and make it soar!
Review: I was born (barely) while World War II was still being fought. And, even though it was over two months later, to my parents' generation it was the defining event and I grew up in its shadow. The Battle of Britain, especially, was a David-and-Goliath story to make my heart pound: the exploits of the Royal Air Force, the grim courage of the civilian population, the small beleaguered island nation against the Nazi war machine. What a drama.

Although THE CLOUDS ABOVE has all the suspense and pathos you'd expect from a novel set in those legendary days, it also goes deeper, giving a real sense of what it was like to be alive then. It evokes not only the outer signposts of a country under siege (the constant danger, profound fatigue, late trains, rationed food) but its inner landscape --- for this book, as its subtitle suggests, is a romance. Drawing on the wartime diaries of his mother, who was a nurse, Andrew Greig alternates between two voices: Len Westbourne, a young RAF pilot and Stella Gardam, a WAAF radar operator trained to spot enemy aircraft. The device makes sense both structurally and emotionally. We get the queasy normality of life on the ground versus the dizzy, sped-up horror of aerial battles. We get middle-class, university-educated, initially snobbish Stella versus gangly country boy Len, whose father works in a factory. And we get the slow, unbearably sweet progress of their love, which they first resist as too big a risk (the RAF was not known for its long lifespans), until the war makes them see that no longer is anything safe nor is there any reason to hold back.

The war in this novel is more than a conflict --- it is an enormous catalyst for change. "One day there may be a generation without a great war," Stella thinks. "What will they do then to know themselves?" Adolescent habits and attachments fall away as planes are shot down, radar huts bombed and dance halls blown to smithereens. Conventions and social divisions loosen and totter --- Stella makes friends with Maddy Phillps, an ebullient if "unrespectable" charmer and with her "posh" sergeant, Foxy Farringdon (perfect teeth, perfect nails, country house, upper-class drawl). Len draws close to a Pole serving in the RAF, Tadeusz, a bitter, tragic figure whose country has already fallen victim to Hitler. The pilots, in fact, form a club more select than any elite London establishment.

Both of them try not to become morally numb --- Len agonizes over what it means to kill, while Stella imagines a young Fraulein at a radar screen on the other side of the Channel. They struggle to live and, at the same time, prepare to die, recognizing finally that this contradiction is the human condition, not just a byproduct of war. "How can we love anyone in wartime?" Stella thinks as she and Len ride back on the train from a week's leave in the country. "It's too stupid. Then I looked round the train . . . and saw that everyone on it was going to die, sooner or later. How can we love in the face of that? Then again, how can we not? Wartime is like real life but more so."

Part of the "more so" is that war tends to knock out both past and future; life is experienced mostly in the present tense. To reflect this immediacy, Greig tells his story in short bursts, moment by moment. Some of them are unspeakable (Stella's coworker lying dead after a raid; Len blowing off a Luftwaffe pilot's head), while others are extraordinarily joyful. One summer day, Len and Stella picnic by the river and she swims naked. They have begun to allow themselves to think of marriage and children. Len imagines that he may survive; Stella, in an act of faith and hope, makes love without contraceptives. At least for the afternoon, they snatch back the future that the war has stolen from them.

Greig is a poet as well as a novelist (THE CLOUDS ABOVE is the first of his books to be published in this country) and it shows. This is a beautifully written novel, with a fresh, unsentimental use of language that feels natural to the story. It is as if the intensity of war and love awakens both Stella and Len to a fierce lyricism they might not have otherwise achieved. "I still loved flying, that was something," Len thinks. "That lift as I came unstuck from the earth again. The sense of dreamy freedom, for all the noise, as I watched dabs of clouds passing by beneath, and below them the green fields, roads, and farmhouses, as we set our course for War." Or Stella: "Len's youth and vulnerability and kisses had dragged the heart out of me, and it lay so open I wondered if it couldn't be seen beating in the moonlight."

THE CLOUDS ABOVE received excellent reviews, but it hasn't been talked about much. It should be. Get this glorious book. Read it and give it to friends. It will break your heart and also make it soar.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Rating:
Summary: Hard to read
Review: The beginning was so confusing I couldn't keep who was talking straight. The change of view should have been more obvious. Of course the ending was unexpected but not a total surprise. The descriptions were very good of the fighting and the landscape. I was dissapointed.

Rating:
Summary: poignant without sappiness
Review: This lovely book serves as a shattering reminder of the horrors that our grandparents faced in order to allow us to be so free and easy. We walk along streets and buildings that once were bombed, where people died, where people fought. It is so easy to forget when the scars are so well hidden. I am glad that writers like Greig remind us how lucky we are.

Written as a first person narrative (ostensibly as the journals of the protagonanists), but taking the views of two people, it can occasionally be confusing as you jump from one persons thoughts to another without warning. But the first person double narrative works in giving insight to two people as they fight for themselves, for us, for each other. It is a love story and a war story. You know these people. They could be you, caught up in something world changing and horrifying. It made me close my eyes and be thankful that they made these sacrifices so that I wouldn't have to.

Rating:
Summary: poignant without sappiness
Review: This lovely book serves as a shattering reminder of the horrors that our grandparents faced in order to allow us to be so free and easy. We walk along streets and buildings that once were bombed, where people died, where people fought. It is so easy to forget when the scars are so well hidden. I am glad that writers like Greig remind us how lucky we are.

Written as a first person narrative (ostensibly as the journals of the protagonanists), but taking the views of two people, it can occasionally be confusing as you jump from one persons thoughts to another without warning. But the first person double narrative works in giving insight to two people as they fight for themselves, for us, for each other. It is a love story and a war story. You know these people. They could be you, caught up in something world changing and horrifying. It made me close my eyes and be thankful that they made these sacrifices so that I wouldn't have to.