I like the humor and atmosphere of A Long Way from Verona, which is basically a coming-of-age story set in England about a year into WWII. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jessica Vye, is solitary and quirky: she starts off by saying she is “not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine” (15). She means violent in the sense of an epiphany: when she’s nine, a writer comes to her school to give a talk, which turns out to be more interesting than anyone expected; he ends, as he’s leaving, by shouting, “To hell with school. English is what matters. ENGLISH IS LIFE” (17). Jessica is struck by this, though she hasn’t been much of a bookish child thus far:
I was only nine and I wasn’t really far off fairy tales. They had had a job getting me started reading at all actually, because I was always wandering about, making these scrawls on my father’s foolscap, pressing my face against windows and so forth; WASTING TIME, as they all kept saying. He kept on—book after book after book that I’d never even heard of, poems and stories and conversations and bits of plays, all in different voices. And I sat so still I couldn’t get up off the floor when it was over, I was so stiff. (ibid.)
Jessica’s so won over by the writer that she mails him everything she’s written; months later, as her family’s about to move to another town where her father is going to be a curate, she gets a letter back telling her she is “A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT” (20).
Then comes, basically, the story of Jessica’s life at school and home at age twelve: we hear about her classmates, her lack of popularity, how another girl overhears a teacher saying she “was getting above herself and needed a bit of setting down” (34). We hear about her closest friend, Florence; a whole chapter is letters between them, when Jessica is home from school with tonsillitis. We hear about her family, including her hilarious father, who is described like this:
He says a great deal most of the time, and he sings a lot. ‘The Lord of HOSTS is with us,’ he’ll sing to the cat on the stairs. ‘The God of JACOB is our refuge.’ He’ll walk down the High Street and see the poor old butcher standing on his step with a great empty slab and he’ll sing ‘Forty days and forty nights’ very sorrowfully. (86)
To balance out the teacher who wants to take Jessica down a peg, there’s a teacher who is kind to her; there’s also a story about a house-party in the countryside, and a boy Jessica meets there: all everyday things. But this is all, too, against the wartime backdrop: ration coupons and food shortages and air raid sirens and bombs. At one point, Jessica retreats to the public library and decides to read all the English classics, and is struck by the negative fatalism of Jude the Obscure, by the idea that good fortune doesn’t come to Jude “BECAUSE IT NEVER DOES” come, not to anyone. Except, of course, sometimes it does, even alongside misfortunes, which is part of what Jessica knows already, but maybe needs to re-learn.
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