This is a remarkable book and one of the most powerful war memoirs, fiction or nonfiction, that I've read. (And I've just finshed reading some excellent WW2 nonfiction memoirs--With The Old Breed, If You Survive, A Pillow For My Helmet, and No Birds Sang). What makes it so powerful is its remarkable directness and bitterness of tone--there is no pretense or "art" in the narrative that one is aware of. Upon finishing it, I had a strong feeling that it was essentially a nonfiction description of events in the life of the author. Reading Ms. Marcus's Afterword and looking up the author on Wikipedia, I have realized that the novel is indeed art and not purely, if at all, autobiographical.
Helen Zenna Smith is an ambulance driver in France just behind the front lines, and the story begins with her description of her exhaustion, lack of decent food, suffering from lice and cold, and subjection to the petty tyrannical behavior of the female commander of the unit. The ambulance drivers tend to be populated by daughters of the upper and upper-middle class, some of whom actually paid the government for their positions. The story takes us through Helen's experience with air raids, traumatizing observation of all the ways in which soldiers can be mutilated, loss of comrades, and final rejection of the whole experience. Her alienation is total, and it causes a resentment of her parents and their friends whom she sees as cheerleaders for the war. She becomes engaged to the son of her mother's friend (a quasi-friend who is also a rival in the war on the homefront), and briefly experiences a physical relationship with him. She is forced to return to the front as a consequence of taking a loan to pay for her sister's abortion, but this time she chooses to work as a domestic, among the working class women in the WAACS, which offends her parents and aunt. By the end of the story, her sister is dead, her fiance is blind and an amputee, and she is emotionally a vacuum. Putting the plot in stark summary form, it may seem contrived, but the novel is sufficently well written that it seems plausible to the reader (at least to this reader).
Helen Zenna Smith is a pseudonym of Evadne Price, who was a prolific romance writer and ended up in Australia well known for writing an astrology column. Although Not So Quiet is supposedly based in part on the diary of a Winifred Young, whether that is so is unclear from what I've read. It seems that Ms. Price, like Stephen Crane, is utterly adept at creating an apparent verisimilitude of an experience she never experienced. Not So Quiet has been criticized for its terribly bitter tone, the self-centeredness of the narrator, and the philosophically simple-minded viewpoint of its pacificistic perspective. I think the bitter tone and intense views of the narrator enhance the feeling of realism in the story, rather than detracting from its merits. (And I don't judge literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, based on the writer's or narrator's attitude towards war.) "Not So Quiet" appears to be a play upon the title of Erich Maria Remarque's novel. Another criticism of Not So Quiet is that it is simply taken from Remarque's story, but I've read both and just don't see it. In my opinion, Not So Quiet stands on its own, and stands very well. I do think it is one paragraph too long, however.
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Top reviews from other countries
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Michel ZinkReviewed in France on August 7, 2018
La guerre de 14 vécue par des ambulancières britanniques
- The Trusted ReaderReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2014
One of the most uncompromising, unflinching accounts for the First World War I have ever read
- PersReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2000
Totally compelling account of a woman's experience of war
