I was born (barely) while World War II was still being fought. And,
even though it was over two months later, to my parents' generation
it was the defining event and I grew up in its shadow. The Battle
of Britain, especially, was a David-and-Goliath story to make my
heart pound: the exploits of the Royal Air Force, the grim courage
of the civilian population, the small beleaguered island nation
against the Nazi war machine. What a drama.

Although THE CLOUDS ABOVE has all the suspense and pathos you'd
expect from a novel set in those legendary days, it also goes
deeper, giving a real sense of what it was like to be alive then.
It evokes not only the outer signposts of a country under siege
(the constant danger, profound fatigue, late trains, rationed food)
but its inner landscape --- for this book, as its subtitle
suggests, is a romance. Drawing on the wartime diaries of his
mother, who was a nurse, Andrew Greig alternates between two
voices: Len Westbourne, a young RAF pilot and Stella Gardam, a WAAF
radar operator trained to spot enemy aircraft. The device makes
sense both structurally and emotionally. We get the queasy
normality of life on the ground versus the dizzy, sped-up horror of
aerial battles. We get middle-class, university-educated, initially
snobbish Stella versus gangly country boy Len, whose father works
in a factory. And we get the slow, unbearably sweet progress of
their love, which they first resist as too big a risk (the RAF was
not known for its long lifespans), until the war makes them see
that no longer is anything safe nor is there any reason to hold
back.

The war in this novel is more than a conflict --- it is an enormous
catalyst for change. "One day there may be a generation without a
great war," Stella thinks. "What will they do then to know
themselves?" Adolescent habits and attachments fall away as planes
are shot down, radar huts bombed and dance halls blown to
smithereens. Conventions and social divisions loosen and totter ---
Stella makes friends with Maddy Phillps, an ebullient if
"unrespectable" charmer and with her "posh" sergeant, Foxy
Farringdon (perfect teeth, perfect nails, country house,
upper-class drawl). Len draws close to a Pole serving in the RAF,
Tadeusz, a bitter, tragic figure whose country has already fallen
victim to Hitler. The pilots, in fact, form a club more select than
any elite London establishment.

Both of them try not to become morally numb --- Len agonizes over
what it means to kill, while Stella imagines a young Fraulein at a
radar screen on the other side of the Channel. They struggle to
live and, at the same time, prepare to die, recognizing finally
that this contradiction is the human condition, not just a
byproduct of war. "How can we love anyone in wartime?" Stella
thinks as she and Len ride back on the train from a week's leave in
the country. "It's too stupid. Then I looked round the train . . .
and saw that everyone on it was going to die, sooner or later. How
can we love in the face of that? Then again, how can we not?
Wartime is like real life but more so."

Part of the "more so" is that war tends to knock out both past and
future; life is experienced mostly in the present tense. To reflect
this immediacy, Greig tells his story in short bursts, moment by
moment. Some of them are unspeakable (Stella's coworker lying dead
after a raid; Len blowing off a Luftwaffe pilot's head), while
others are extraordinarily joyful. One summer day, Len and Stella
picnic by the river and she swims naked. They have begun to allow
themselves to think of marriage and children. Len imagines that he
may survive; Stella, in an act of faith and hope, makes love
without contraceptives. At least for the afternoon, they snatch
back the future that the war has stolen from them.

Greig is a poet as well as a novelist (THE CLOUDS ABOVE is the
first of his books to be published in this country) and it shows.
This is a beautifully written novel, with a fresh, unsentimental
use of language that feels natural to the story. It is as if the
intensity of war and love awakens both Stella and Len to a fierce
lyricism they might not have otherwise achieved. "I still loved
flying, that was something," Len thinks. "That lift as I came
unstuck from the earth again. The sense of dreamy freedom, for all
the noise, as I watched dabs of clouds passing by beneath, and
below them the green fields, roads, and farmhouses, as we set our
course for War." Or Stella: "Len's youth and vulnerability and
kisses had dragged the heart out of me, and it lay so open I
wondered if it couldn't be seen beating in the moonlight."

THE CLOUDS ABOVE received excellent reviews, but it hasn't been
talked about much. It should be. Get this glorious book. Read it
and give it to friends. It will break your heart and also make it
soar.