War on the Margins: A Novel | Libby Cone | What if the Nazis had won?

War on the Margins: A Novel | Libby Cone | Intensity Squared

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War on the Margins...

	War on the Margins: A Novel Libby Cone BookSurge Publishing, 2008 - 338 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At the beginning of the Second World War, after the fall of France, Churchill decides to demilitarize the islands in the English Channel, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark, and allow their occupation by the Nazis because of their proximity to the Occupied French coast. We see the effects of this upon clerk Marlene Zimmer, the child of a deceased Jewish father and Gentile mother. She abruptly leaves her home to avoid registering as a Jew, meets the Surrealist artists and longtime lovers Claude Cahun (Lucille Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) and becomes active in their Resistance work. After Cahun and Moore are captured by the secret police, she flees and meets Peter, an escaped Polish slave worker. We follow Suzanne and Lucille as they suffer in German military prison, and revisit Marlene as she slowly realizes that the decisions she has made resulted in the imprisonment of one woman and the saving of the life of another.

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What if the Nazis had won?

The occupation of the channel islands by the Germans during world war Two gives the best possible insight into what life in Britain would have been like had Hitler won.
The remarkable account of the occupation is a must-read for anyone who wishes to get a flavor of the nazi mind-set, and how it affected the lives, loves and behavior of the islanders.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the occupation was just how gradually the Nazis tightened the noose around the island people. Impersonal, matter-of-fact bulletins from the German commander politely instructed Jews - anyone with slight Jewish antecedents - to report to the town hall to register their names. All quite innocent, and gradually the demands increase. Register any business interests, your nationality, wear identification, have a red mark on your file. It slowly builds up to the true horrors in store for those the Germans regarded as sub-human.

In the middle of this, how did the islands cope? How did life continue?

Libby Cone has produced a compelling account of just that. She takes you back to that dreadful time, when Hitler ruled Europe, and shows how ordinary people were caught up in the nazi horror. The gradual creeping of the restrictions on liberty have a resonance today.

Yet amid the harrow, there is love and humanity. To really understand how WW11 changed lives forever, read this book

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Intensity Squared

At first I thought I wasn't going to be able to enjoy this book. Ms. Cone has a writing style unlike those I'm more familiar and comfortable with. Her sentence structure is terse and truncated. Then, as the characters came alive for me, the personal writing style morphed into a high intensity form of tension completely relaying the character's manic internal sense of survival.
Their daily struggle, in that little back corner of World War II, became riveting.
A solid read, through and through.

An Unexpected Gem

World War Two will likely be an endless source of interesting stories for as long as memory of the twentieth century survives. And while the great battles - and many minor ones - have been covered in exquisite detail, every once in a while there surfaces an unexpected gem like "War on the Margins."

The story centers on the inhabitants of the British channel islands, which ironically sit on the French side of the English channel, not all that far as the crow flies from Normandy. Winston Churchill ordered the islands evacuated after the German invasion of France, but many people decided to stay behind, and the Germans occupied the islands soon thereafter and remained there until the end of the war in Europe.

Among those who remained behind were a number of Jews and individuals of Jewish descent, including the main characters of the story: Marlene Zimmer, Suzanne Malherbe and Lucille Schwob. The story focuses on their efforts as part of the Resistance to avoid the Nazi witch hunt for the handful of Jews (including the heriones) on the island, and to do what they can to thwart the invaders. Later, the focus shifts to their determination to survive and keep their dignity as Marlene is forced into hiding, and Suzanne and Lucille are imprisoned.

In some ways, this story reminded me a lot of "Empire of the Sun" by J.G. Ballard. It doesn't have the gut-wrenching action of "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers," but the courage displayed by a number of the channel islanders - the trio of heroines, in particular - is every bit as poignant. The weaknesses of the islanders are exposed, as well, from neighbors informing on each other to settle old scores, to actions taken by the heroines that - upon later reflection - were well-intentioned but had grievous consequences for others.

The style of the story is also unique, intermixing official correspondence between some of the island officials and the Germans with the events during the occupation, as told through the eyes of the heroines and other islanders. The correspondence serves both as a frame of reference as time passes during the occupation, and a frightful outline of the increasingly ominous Nazi policies toward the Jews.

All in all, it was a very engaging read, and highly recommended not only for those with an interest in the war or the Holocaust, but for anyone looking for a refreshing example of extraordinary courage demonstrated by ordinary people.

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War in a time of loss of standards

The book does a very nice job of showing the moral complexity of life under occupation. All of the rules of civilized society are gone and those (on the margins of society) are left to develop new modes of conduct in this marginal theater of WWII. The book is interesting in showing a relatively unknown area of WWII (located in the heart of the English Channel) and also for showing the moral complexity involved.

Interesting and ambitious but soulless

If you liked The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (I didn't particularly care for it), you might like War on the Margins, which also tells the story of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. Unlike Guernsey, War on the Margins is not the least bit frivolous or formulaic.

War on the Margins threads together the fictionalized stories of several Channel Island residents suffering under the German occupation. Historical documents and letters are mixed liberally into the narrative, giving the book a serious, realistic tone. Although these historical details lend authenticity, this added material breaks up the flow of the narrative, reducing the emotional effect. War on the Margins contains too many separate stories to allow for the satisfying development of any one story, further decreasing the emotional impact. The overall effect is a book that's interesting and ambitious (and better than Guernsey) but soulless.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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