Book review: Earthly Creatures by Stevie Davies

Philippa Holloway

Stevie Davies’s latest novel continues her unflinching exploration of the complexities of the WWⅡ. Following Boy Blueand The Element of Water, Earthly Creatures is an intimate account of a young woman’s negotiation of identity coming of age inside the politics and propaganda of Germany during Hitler’s reign.

Following Magda as she takes up her assigned post as a teacher on the edge of Prussia in 1941 and leaves her father, a humanist and author, behind, we are given an intimate view of the forces that shaped minds and actions within this period of German history.

Hinges

While many authors seek out tales of heroism, resistance and forbidden love in their portrayal of women in war novels, most stick to familiar territory, both narrative and geographic. They may touch on the particular vulnerabilities or abilities of those women, but they often do little more than engage the emotions of the reader in a familiar and almost reassuring way.

All shall be well, they tell us. The good guys win. Romantic love prevails…Stevie Davies avoids these familiar tropes, and the result is a novel that gets deeper into the subject matter of conflict than it at first seems.

‘Halfway up the stairs, Magda seemed to register a dizzying silence from next door. It stopped her in her tracks. Dr Süsskind was gone. Really gone. He would never come back. He did not exist.’

What distinguishes Davies’ writing is her positioning of the story, and the protagonist, to explore the deeper issues underpinning the atrocities of fascism and wars it ignites.

Magda is a girl caught, not just halfway up the stairs and suddenly aware of the proximity of political violence to her domestic sanctuary, but in the hinge of her own development into adulthood. Caught too, in the hinge of a generational and ideological divide in response to the rise of fascism, and on the hinge of own understanding of herself, her relationships, her country and her beliefs.

In choosing a protagonist in this liminal state – someone who is on the surface malleable as all young folk are by the desire to forge an independent identity and embrace a new political promise for future prosperity, and who hasn’t the biology or age to have any overt agency or effect on the machinations of politics or ideology – we are given the chance to bear witness from a vantage point unusual in WW2 stories, and that deftly avoids any romanticising of either the women Magda lives and works with, or the War itself.

The deep forest

Similarly, by taking us away from the usual settings of Paris and Berlin, and away from the fully adult world, Davies opens up and critiques the true scope of the landscape of fascism. Deep in the ancient forests of Prussia, suspended between the brutal frontlines and the city austerity and surveillance, there is a subtle version of both at play.

This setting ensures the intimacies of ideology rather than the headlines – the language games, personal perceptions, and inner mental games needed to survive, to acknowledge, and to resist, if only in that very private sphere of the mind – are fully revealed.

We see in this novel fascism’s seductive lure as well as its destructive force.

A glistening web

Davies’s achieves this via her skill of interweaving of smaller, often seemingly trivial or subtle themes and imagery that are actually the structural core of the story with the wider issues more familiar to the reader. Just as spider’s silk is delicate and finely woven but pound for pound is stronger that steel, so too are Davies’s smallest observations, descriptions and characters’ actions full of glistening tensile strength that ensures the narrative can carry the weight of history while also bringing a vivid new glimpse of the rise and fall of the Third Reich into our hearts and minds.

Bearing Witness

Reading this novel took me back to my own adolescence, and my first exposure to the holocaust beyond classroom textbooks and statistics, abstract warnings and standing by the cenotaph every November. My mother, recognising the value of bearing witness to negotiate the self towards the right kind of adult mind, took me to see Schindler’s List in the cinema, even though I was only just fourteen and the film was certified a 15.

This breach of the rules by my mother lent a gravity to the event that cannot be overstated, and so I entered the theatre not with the thrill of a teen sneaking in to seek out entertainment meant for older, more mature eyes, but with the knowledge in the pit of my stomach that this mattered. Mattered enough to warrant the deception at the ticket booth. An act of resistance itself, and a valuable part of the lessons I learned that evening.

I emerged hours later into the bright colourful hallway, acutely aware of my own safety, my rights, and my ability to choose what I did next. Stevie Davies herself was roughly the same age, thirteen, when her father took her to Dachau, when she herself bore witness directly to the atrocities of war as a girl on the hinge of her own identity. Her ability to look – to look deeply, critically, openly, tenderly, unflinchingly, and honestly, into those halfway places and concepts and events, into the ever-shifting space in which cruelty and admiration merge, in which humans are united and divided by manipulative language and ideology – is what positions Earthly Creatures as perhaps the best novel yet of this time, place and subject matter.

Value

To read this novel now – as fascism again creeps through the Western world and captures people on the hinge of their own identities, using global communication technologies and social media to spread propaganda – is to realise it is not a singularly a work of historical fiction, but a work of humanist philosophy too. Its value cannot be overstated. This is a book that should be read in schools across the world, but that I am sure would be banned from many. That fact alone tells us its great worth.

Stevie Davies’ Earthly Creatures is published by Honno. It is available from all good bookshops.