Passchendaele

Matthew Sweet’s jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland opens with the grande dame reclining on her chaise longue in the library of Camfield Place, her home for 50 years. Here she could be found daily between 1.15 p.m. and 4 p.m., a ghoulish masquerade of femininity in a hot-pink taffeta cocktail gown with a snappy Pekinese nestling by her side. Her face, beneath the halo of Elnett-stiffened yellow hair, is an inch of white powder. There are two clownish circles of rouge on her cheeks and sticking plasters on her temples to tighten the skin. Gazing into the middle distance through tarantula-sized false eyelashes lathered in black boot polish, she is ‘talking, talking, talking’. (Boot polish applied with a toothbrush is preferable to mascara because it stays put when you cry.

This novel, set towards the end of the first world war, is eerie and fanciful yet gruesomely down-to-earth. It features Laura Iven, formerly a nurse at the Front – awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1915 – and her brother Freddie, part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force sent to take Passchendaele Ridge in November 1917. Owing to a deep shrapnel wound, Laura is back home in Halifax, Canada. It is January 1918, and the previous month her parents died when their ship Mont Blanc exploded in Halifax harbour. To make matters even worse, Freddie is missing. Laura is now a live-in nurse companion to three elderly sisters who conduct séances. A parcel arrives containing Freddie’s jacket and a German postcard with a cryptic note.