Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers
Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers
Definitions (2007) (First published 1999)
334 pages
My initial thoughts, some of which I typed into a text document while I was reading the book: Oh. That’s a surprising start. And I remember wondering: Will there be boys kissing later on? You can just see the good influences of certain online friends creeping into my thought process, XD. The answer, by the way, is “yes”, but it’s more incidental than being something actually important to the plot.
I don’t really know much about the Second World War. The only parts that are really familiar are often the parts where my country is involved, thanks to the (compulsory) Malaysian History subject I took when I was in school. I know the major events, and some of the major battles, but when it comes down to it, I know very little of the whole thing. (It makes me wonder: whatever did I learn during that one year of World History when I was in the Fourth Form? I vaguely remember chapters about the ancient civilizations and the rise of Christianity and Islam and the Renaissance period. Surely it didn’t stop there?)
Postcards from No Man’s Land is partially about World War II. The story begins with Jacob Todd, an English boy in the present-day (1995, I think?) Amsterdam, who’s there to visit the family that had taken care of his grandfather during the Battle of Anhem, and it’s the fifty-first anniversary of the battle. Jacob, travelling alone for the first time, finds himself facing unexpected situations and having to make difficult decisions.
Parallel to his story is the story of Geertrui, the young woman who takes care of Jacob’s grandfather during WWII. The narrative switches between Jacob wandering through the streets of Amsterdam and Geertrui struggling for survival during the war, and the stories eventually come together.
I mostly liked the book. It’s well written, a bit slow at points, but the shifting narratives between Jacob (in third person) and Geertrui (in first person) didn’t bother me, which is a really good thing because the first person POV often gets on my nerves, and the last book with dual narratives — that would be Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy — left me gritting my teeth in frustration. The ending is a bit clunky and perhaps a little hasty, but it still works for me. The later parts of Geertrui’s narrative reminded me — very sharply, actually — of Daisy in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now: there was something similar in the desperate, we-only-have-this-moment tone in both of the girls’ voices.
I found Jacob’s story more interesting than Geertrui’s. His self-consciousness and shyness and his trying to accept himself is rather endearing. And I rather liked following him around Amsterdam as he discovers the city (and himself) than reading about the hardships of war; besides, he ends up having rather interesting conversations with Daan, Geertrui’s grandson, one of them about art history. Curious stuff.
More than anything else, this is another coming-of-age story — about sexuality and discovering yourself, finding your way, making choices, falling in love. The book also touches on other issues such as euthenasia and fidelity and adultery and bisexuality, and you’re pretty much left to make up your own mind at the end of it.
This book won both the Carnegie Medal (1999) and the Printz Award (2003). Apparently the book is part of a sequence called The Dance Sequence, and this is the fifth book. Other books in the sequence are: Breaktime, Dance on my Grave, Now I Know and The Toll Bridge. The library only has the sixth (and last) book, This Is All: the Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, which I’ll probably borrow one of these days. Not any time soon, though. It’s really, really thick! And so many frustrated reviewers. Hm. We’ll see.
