Flatlands

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While the author stays true to the central theme of The Snow Goose, also naming her characters Freda and Philip, (Frith and Philip in Gallico’s novella) Hubbard’s characters are developed with much depth. She arrives in the Fens,the harsh bleak flatlands of great natural beauty and wilderness, bitterly cold, windy, and desolate, and taken in by the impoverished Willocks into their dilapidated broken down home. The first is the interior monologue of Freda as an old woman whom we gradually learn is in a care home.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Too many names of prominent artists and intellectual figures of the time and too many details from BBC Home Service war reports also added to the tedium.A haunting and lyrical novel about loneliness and the compensations of the natural world, art and unlikely friendships.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. I was surprised to read that the novel is a retelling of Paul Gallico’s children’s story The Snow Goose; I remember reading it and many other novels by him when I was a teenager, fifty-some years ago. This story is loosely based on the Gallico story 'The Snow Goose' and the life of Peter Scott but is wholely fictional. The two become unlikely friends, but just when you think things will take a turn for the better, in comes the end of the book.but as a very old woman looking back that seemed the cause of the luster of some of the memories -- which seemed strange. Then life happens again, and decades upon decades later, she remembers him with detail in her journal. One dad in the story from the little girl's neighborhood even says, "The government was never interested in helping my kids before. Philip is a lonely, anxious, and conflicted man with his own demons, a conscientious objector, who has lost his faith, experienced mental health, emotional and sexual identity issues, and finding solace in nature, painting, and hard work. However, his action results in his death and in the little girl having no one to help when she finally gets the courage to leave her assigned "family" and come to him.

The plight of evacuee children such as Freda sent away from their homes to live with strangers and the uncertainty associated with the same is at times difficult to read. Stories are created from silence and absence, though the space between words can be so wide you feel you might drown. In addition to the stories of people in the countryside, there is one particular scene setting in Dunkirk where the small boats are evacuating the retreating soldiers, which is highly visual and contrasts, with the domesticity of much of the rest of the story. After a railroad trip, she is taken up in the flatlands of Britain by a family paid by the government to shelter her. Sue Hubbard is revered by her peers and her talent has been compared to that of Colm Toibin, William Trevor and Anne Enright.It’s a novel of reminiscence that drifts back and forth between time zones and the two main protagonists, Freda and Philip .