29 Jan 2014 01:49:19
In fact, the idea of commemorating an anonymous soldier had circulated in Britain and France throughout the war. The body of the unknown soldier represented war at its most deadly and egalitarian, as a stripping away of any sign of rank or social status, and its commemoration was offered as an opportunity for collective mourning. Without identity, he belonged to everyone.
To enact such weighty symbolism required carefully choreographed ritual. Remains were exhumed from four battle areas and brought to a chapel near Arras on the night of 7 November 1920. Each skeleton was covered with a union jack before one was selected and placed in a coffin made from Hampton Court oak, along with a trench helmet and a khaki belt; a 16th-century crusader's sword was fixed on top. On Armistice Day, the bones were buried in Westminster Abbey, and in Whitehall the Cenotaph – or "empty grave" – was unveiled.
Wake takes place over the five days between the exhumation and burial of the British Unknown Warrior. Each of the five sections of Anna Hope's thoroughly researched novel interweaves details of the body's ritualised journey toward London with the emotional journeys of three city women – each carefully created for her representative qualities. Forty-five‑year-old Ada, from Hackney, east London, is haunted by the memory of a son whose death remains a mystery for much of the novel; Evelyn, from Primrose Hill, north London, and two weeks shy of her 30th birthday, can't get over the death of her lover; Hettie, from Hammersmith, west London, and just 19, has lost her father to the Spanish flu and her brother to the catatonia of shell shock. The novel's title refers both to their attempts to watch over their dead and to their faltering efforts to come to terms with loss. Wake suggests that talking to a stranger about "it", and "sharing" the "truth" of whatever it might be, is "enough" to make life "lighter"; a therapeutic message not unfamiliar to readers of modern novels. Evelyn is the only character allowed to express any scepticism about the "show" of the Unknown Warrior. "This is supposed to make it all right, is it?" she asks her brother Ed (a Hemingway drunk with problems "down there"). "This burial? This pulling a body from the earth in France and dragging him over here? And all of us standing, watching, weeping?"
But, finally, she too is caught up in the "unexpected blessing" of November sunshine and the sounds of the city's bells "chiming together and apart". By 1920, Hope insists, it's time to have one final sob and then, well, wake up; it's time to make yourself pretty again, to put on a more cheerful frock, to cut that Edwardian hair, and, as the novel's central metaphor has it, start dancing again. The present-tense narrative takes us away from a past that can never be retrieved towards a future that tastes of "sherbet" and sounds like Dixieland jazz. Could we be so blithe about those who were bereaved by 9/11 or by the Iraq or Afghanistan wars?
