Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is essentially a story about what courage is, and how it reveals itself under pressure. While it lacks the hallucinatory brilliance of Bowen’s The Demon Lover or the emotional power and complexity of Waters’ The Night Watch, it is an absorbing, sharply paced novel.
Cleave uses these young people to expose human suffering during this terrible time in history, but he encircles all the tragedies in the human heart’s capacity to heal, regain hope and move on. This is a novel that embraces human confidence that life can be patched and sutured to resemble happier times. In the end, Cleave remixes the novel’s title, writing, 'It was a world one might still know, if everyone forgiven was brave.'”
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a narrative of redemption. All the same, it leaves the novel with significant problems because it flattens out the conflicts, rendering them more as device or backdrop than transformative experience ... War, like any great upheaval, alters us — or it ought to — turning our hearts and psyches unexpectedly. In Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, however, such a turning never happens, since the characters come to us fully formed.
Written with wit and grace, Everyone Brave is Forgiven is not a chronicle of their war years — Cleave is too imaginative for that — but it’s inspired by their lives and letters, their deprivations and their resilience. World War II is the ultimate romantic war, at least if you watch the old movies, and accordingly, Cleave shapes Everyone Brave is Forgiven around a painful love triangle, that staple of World War II fiction. But Cleave’s work is not a cliche: In this novel, romance is imperfect, love fickle. Courage doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, and even a mostly good heart can be blind to ugly truths ... Everyone Brave is Forgiven asks hard questions with no easy answers, reminding us of the price we pay every day just for being human.
Beautifully written and gut-wrenchingly hopeful, Everyone Brave is Forgiven is an insightful portrait of a time when every day felt perilous and no one was guaranteed survival. Strikingly intense, this new novel by the award-winning author of the bestseller Little Bee will resonate strongly with a wide range of readers.
There’s a heartfelt author’s note at the end of Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, the new novel by Chris Cleave, about his grandparents, who inspired the book. It’s touching and engaging; the tale that precedes it, unfortunately, is a flavorless replica of dozens of others, offering us the same shattered glass, the same air raid sirens, the same soldiers on foreign soil ... Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is mawkish and manipulative and cutesy; its first half is punishingly boring; its minor characters, from a dyslexic young black American to a stammering Army pal, are each little factories for producing melodrama. Yet somehow, for all this, Cleave’s novel finally did begin to work its way under my skin. He’s an undeniably skillful writer, fluid, clever, and often graceful.
Cleave unflinchingly exposes the personal hang-ups of his characters as they grapple with hard life choices. He harnesses his immense talent for crafting gorgeously insightful turns of phrase to show us how courage and cowardice sometimes exist side-by-side in the same person — even in the same decision ... Everyone Brave is Forgiven may not be as up-to-the-minute as his explorations of post-9/11 society, the global migrant crisis or elite women’s athletics, but like those novels, it is both searing and timeless.
Although marketed as a love story, this characterization feels disingenuous. Love is at the center of the novel; first Mary and Tom’s love, and later Mary and Alistair’s confusion at their affection for one another. But this is not a tale about love overcoming all obstacles. This is a narrative about a war, and the struggle to find order in the debris of a slowly but steadily bombed out city. Cleave excels at building tension grounded in uncertainty, despite the reader knowing the results of World War II ... It’s a testament to the strength of Cleave’s writing that the reader feels the shock of each sudden turn. The pictures he paints are so vivid that when they are disrupted by an air raid, a plane crash or another catastrophe, the reader is forced to adapt to this new reality along with the characters.
Cleave’s latest novel — which is wonderful, not surprisingly — continues to explore human endurance in all its many facets, this time during World War II. Like most Brits, Cleave had family in that fight: a grandfather stationed on Malta during its siege, and two grandmothers in London, one an ambulance driver and the other a teacher. Written with wit and grace, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is not a chronicle of their war years, but it’s inspired by their lives and letters, their deprivations and their resilience...Cleave, who never writes simplistic stories, refuses any heroic flag-waving and shines a light on an unpleasant side of Britain during the war years: the vicious racism that’s every bit as insidious as German anti-Semitism. Can we demand righteous change in the middle of a national crisis? What takes more courage: dying in battle or living in vain? Everyone Brave Is Forgiven asks hard questions with no easy answers, reminding us of the price we pay every day just for being human.
It’s hard to imagine any new World War II novel counting for much, especially for readers, including myself, who were mesmerized by All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, also set during World War II...Ultimately, this is a story about people who try to hold on to their humanity and maintain a shred of normalcy even as they witness unspeakable gore and lose their limbs or people they love. The least satisfying aspect of this novel is its characters because most of the time they seem like admirable archetypes rather than actual human beings. But their wit, which preserved their sanity, is enviable.
