(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Dancing deftly between the whimsical and the emotional weighty is a tricky thing to pull off in any novel.
Tip too far either way, and the now-lesser part of the story feels pointless, a drag on a narrative that clearly wants to go one way in particular but is prevented from doing so by a remnant element that no longer serves any real purpose.
But when the balance is right, and in The Excitements by C. J. Wray gets it absolutely right in so many beguilingly meaningful ways, the result is a rich mix of humanity that gives you some light and fun moments but also a strong and lingering sense that this all means something, and will continue to mean something long after the last page is turned.
The driver in all this adroit balancing of the lighthearted and the emotionally hefty are the characters, chiefly the two nonagenarian sisters, Josephine and Penny, two whip-smart and sparkly World War Two veterans who may be advanced in years but who retain a zest for life that sees them constantly begging their devoted great-nephew Archie to find them “excitements” to fill their days.
With a cry of “toujours gai”, Penny and Josephine sally forth into each day, eager to see what lies in wait and refusing to simply lay down and die; after all, they survived a cataclysmically tumultuous time in world history, and some bumpy decades afterwards, so why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves now?
‘So you both want to come to the auction house reception?’ he asked them, heart sinking.
Penny nodded. ‘Yes. Absolutely. That would be terribly gai.’
Archie could only hope the sisters would have forgotten all about it by the time they boarded the Eurostar.
Helping them on this path to fun and diversion is the fact that they are of Britain’s most-loved veterans, their presence requested at every major event where reporters and event organisers breathlessly hang on their every word as representatives of what is often called the “greatest generation”.
But while they delight in their time-earned high public profile, and play the part to a tee, they are hiding all kinds of secrets about their pasts and present, and while Archie, and others, think they simply served in fairly minor though important roles in the Women’s Royal Navy and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the truth is far more complex and laden with more import than anyone can guess.
Sure, there are signs – how does Penny know how to take someone with just an umbrella? – that suggest perhaps they were more deeply and substantially involved in the war effort, but while they are garrulous to a fault in many respects, they stay quiet on their past and so any sense of a deeper story to be told fades back into the background.
Of course, their past is very much the carrier and influencer of their present, and so when they are invited to Paris, France, somewhere neither has been in many decades, to get the Légion d’honneur, everything once hidden begins to spill out, in ways intense and whimsically light in a novel that is charming and warm & cosy but with an emotional edge that sits perfectly within it.
(courtesy official C. J. Wray Facebook page)
Styled as a mystery, The Excitements is less a crime novel than a gradual unravelling of past secrets and long-suppressed truths, the kind all of us bury because it’s too painful to have them see the light of day.
Of course Penny and Josephine, because of their storied pasts, have bigger and more impactful secrets than most, and as the trip to Paris goes completely off script and Archie discovers that the great-aunts to whom he is endlessly devoted – they saved him from dull, wealthy parents who valued propriety over existential vigour while his aunts most manifestly did not – it becomes clear that how amazing these two remarkable ladies are.
And the lucky part is that we are taken along for the glorious ride in a story that delights in singing the praises of vivacious engagement with life even as it admits that attacks on that vivacity are trenchant and deep and that for people like Penny and Josephine to get to their nineties with an almost undiminished ardour for being alive, there must be something quite special going on.
But also, and this is key to the emotional richness of The Excitements, that what you see on the surface is not the whole story, and that while these two sisters crave “the excitements” that Archie, a gay art dealer in his forties, can conjure up, they are also nursing great loss and anger and sadness about the past and that, maybe, there is a longer and more involved story to be told.
Josephine tapped, ‘SOS’.
Penny didn’t tap back but kept her hands pressed to her heart. She closed her eyes and muttered, ‘ Dear God, at least save Archie.’
This was one fight she was not going to win.
The fact that it is told so well in The Excitements is testament to the talent of Wray.
She deftly moves between the charming whimsicality of Penny (in particular) and Josephine, and their interactions with just about everyone they come in contact with, and the passion they have for life, and the slow unburdening they go through in Paris where so many of their closely-held secrets have their genesis and where there are so many dangling threads of their life that need tidying up and resolution.
The sad truth is that life rarely affords any of us much in the way of meaningful resolution, but that’s what The Excitements serves up for the two sisters whose return to the city which defined so much of the trajectory of their early lives, either directly or indirectly, becomes a great moment of redefining and re-enlivening as scores are settled, friends lost to time get their memories avenged and burnished and long-covered secrets and burdens finally get revealed and lifted and life lightened and renewed.
There is sadness and darkness and loss in the sisters’ pasts without a doubt, and The Excitements doesn’t pretend for a second otherwise, but the novel is, at heart, a gorgeously hopeful love letter to the power of connection, belonging tenacity and love to set us free and to reinvent lives even as they are near their end, and in so doing, to finally live the lives we have always wanted.
Penny and Josephine get all that and more, and reading as they hilariously and touchingly navigate their pasts, survive rather over busy and action-packed presents and come out the other side to a rather lovely, unburdened future, is a delight that makes The Excitements a joy to read, its balancing of the whimsical and the serious a pleasure throughout that stays with you long after the last wrong has been put right.