The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is a good book, engaging and charming and moving; only someone with a heart of stone could remain unmoved by the people of Guernsey and their sufferings during German occupation in World War II.  The intertwined stories are told through a series of letters, most of them to and from Juliet  Ashton, a writer from England who is beguiled by the islanders and their Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  She becomes determined to write a book about them: the crusty men, the scrappy women, the handsome loner, the orphan, and the rebel heroine who disappears into German custody after harboring a child slave worker.

I loved the way Shaffer and Barrows portrayed the different islanders as they take to reading, first as a ploy to fool the German occupiers, and then as true book addicts. I loved the many references to great works of writing, everyone from Wilfred Owen, poet of World War One (with a wrenching quote from him, “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?  Only the monstrous anger of the guns“), to Charles Lamb (he has been popping up in a lot of my reading lately), to Hemingway, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Catullus, and Wilkie Collins. Oscar Wilde plays a wonderful cameo role in the book and all the Brontes appear at one time or another.

The problem with this book, and what keeps it from being a great book, is that the characters do not stand with the flesh and bones of reality.  They are instead held up by notice signs, “I’m good” or “I’m bad” pastiches of charm or selfishness, barbarism or near saintliness.  The characters were not so much flat — this book is engaging because both plot and characters come alive against a fascinating background — but rather just too simple.  They were romantic and moralistic representations of people, and not real people.  In the end, the main characters and their story are all too romantic to be true.

A great book delves beyond the black and white — the romantic — representations of people and of life, and recognizes the complexity of human actions, motivations, loves, and modes of survival.  Neat endings worked for Jane Austen (another great writer who pops up in the book and makes her mark in more ways than one) but only because Austen’s characters were complex, and evolved over her books’  pages; they worked hard for their neat endings. The characters in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society are each headed in one direction (quite easy to foretell for the main characters) and as much as I enjoyed reading about them, I was never anxious or worried about them; perhaps a sign of a great book is that feeling of uncertainty and anxiety produced when characters we care about are heading off in ways we cannot quite anticipate.  We chew on such plots, we worry over what is the right course for our new friends to take, we debate their choices and praise the good decisions, condemn the bad ones; we grow wiser (sadder or happier) alongside the characters.  Such characters are very real, and engaged in real lives that have parallels to our own.

The background story of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is what elevates this book out of the realm of the romance novel (where its main characters reside) and gives it substance.  The German occupation of Guernsey during World War Two is very real, based on true facts, and it is inspiring and fascinating. The endurance of the islanders, the sacrifices they made (including the horrible choice of sending their children away for safe-keeping in England or keeping them insight on the island), and their determination to rebuild and go on after the war is one story among  hundreds of wartime stories, and all of these stories, from across Europe and throughout Japan and China, have something to tell us about our human capability to not self-destruct but to endure.

Life is full of possibility, and of goodness and evil.  For the characters of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, good and bad are clearly labeled (the authors’ attempts at muddling rang false); if life were like that, we would all find the right man, the right island, and the right child.  But life is complex, and even at its best we do not find the right anything. We create what is right for us by working our way through genuine and difficult problems.  If we are lucky we emerge with true companions and some lessons learned, and maybe a bit of rest before the next hurdle comes along.