6/10/2023 0 Comments The Lie by Helen Dunmore![]() ![]() I see bodies picked up, torn to pieces, flung on to the ground." I see a jagged edge protrude through a thigh or an elbow. I see how their bones would split and separate. "Their skin is a veil to hide the intestines and the raw, slimy flesh within. "In Turk Street it seems to me that every creature is in disguise," Daniel relates. Men like Daniel lived it, and Dunmore conveys why many of them teetered on the edge, forever after. That image of cracked time speaks to our own experience of how World War I changed everything, but we've had 100 years to grow used to it. Once you fall into it, you can't get out again. ![]() It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. "They say the war's over," Daniel muses during the false spring of 1920, as he readies the land for a new crop of life in his native Cornwall. Late in Helen Dunmore's "The Lie," 21-year-old narrator Daniel Branwell tries to explain what Dunmore's entire novel makes clear: Although Daniel may have survived World War I, it will never entirely leave him. ![]()
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