Resistance

by Owen Sheers

Book Overview

Resistance opens in 1944, as the women of a small Welsh farming community wake one morning to find that their husbands have gone. Soon after that a German patrol arrives in their valley. In his hugely... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307385833
• ISBN13: 9780307385833
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Winning Combination of Research and Imagination

Not only does this book conjure a different and frightful fate for England during WWII, it eerily brings home the confusion of war for both the soldiers and the civilians. The author has created a time and place out of time and out of place. The setting is like a character itself - the beautifully rendered farming village on the English/Welsh border. The reader can feel the breeze, hear the sheep and climb amongst the rocks along with the characters. The first half of the book does move slowly, but that is because the author is meticulously laying his foundation for what is to come. Slowly but surely, as the lives of the German male soldiers and the female civilians merge, so does the line between enemies blur and the reader is left to ponder the inexplicitness of war. There are no real answers here, just a deep and pondering look at the way humans are interdependent, and how that is a good thing. In a race to finish the book, the reader discovers that some of the mysteries are resolved, some aren't - leaving us to do some imagining of our own. A device that insures this story will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

outstanding

Although this one is set in Wales rather than Scotland, and after WWII rather than during WWI, this novel reminds me of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song in the dreamy, place-out-of-time atmosphere its author has created. I'm not a fan of historical fiction, but here, history is just the framework for the story. It's mostly about the characters and the setting...and is an exceptionally moving story, anti-war a subtle way. If you require a clearly defined ending with all story lines resolved, you probably won't like it.

Poetic & Evocative

From the blurb aback the cover: Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers's debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power. The subsequent statement is true. The preceding statement is false. The novel is beautifully written, with some of the finest descriptions of a particularly lovely place I can recall reading; it has, as well, some rather horrid elements, both naturally occurring and imagined by the author -- thus making the work both realistic and creative, and an excellent piece of writing. Grace and power, as the blurb states; the grace is in the paeans to the land, and to the people who farm it, and to the buried treasure revealed near the end, while the power is in the savage way the war destroys all of those things, spiritually, physically, or both. However: to call this a debut novel is deceptive, though accurate; Owen Sheers has published award-winning poetry and popular non-fiction in the past, and so this poetic, realistic novel is not too much of a stretch for him, I would think. To say that it unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller is simply not true: this book is not a thriller. It is a poem about the beauty of a place, about the wonder of calling that place "home" and the honor of working hard to make it so, and it is an indictment of those who would destroy our homes in war. This book would now become one of my chief recommendations, were it not for the time and place that I live. Oh, it is appropriate in many ways: I live in a small and rural community that borders a large and thriving metropolis which feels like a separate world because the members of this community create a mental difference disproportionate to the physical one; yet there is great and sometimes terrible beauty here. This country is, at least ostensibly, at war (Our president recently made reference to the novel's war, in fact, albeit in his own inimitably moronic and offensive fashion), and I am sure there are plans set and waiting for the formation of a militia in defense of this country should it be invaded; the war has gone on too long and the soldiers surely feel as do the German soldiers in this book. But my fellow Americans would not accept, I think, the harsh and unbending criticism of war that is Resistance, particularly its hard-to-swallow, but no less true, indictment of those who leave their homes and abandon their families in a futile attempt to protect them from invaders. The hardest part of this novel is the end (To which, I admit, I am not yet fully reconciled), when the reader realizes that the true villains of the piece are not the Nazis, despite their remarkable ability to serve as the most heinous villains of all history and all popular culture for the last seventy years; the villains of this novel are the men who jo

Don't Miss This One

Really good alternate history does more than simply speculate about one or two of the limitless "what if" possibilities offered by the past. In the best writing of this type those "what ifs" are just starting points for stories that go well beyond the big picture to consider what the historical changes would mean to ordinary people caught up in their wake. Resistance, Owen Sheens' debut novel, does exactly that, and does it remarkably well. What if the allied invasion of France had been repelled by a German army fully prepared to meet the invaders on the beaches of Normandy? What if that failed invasion resulted in such a devastating defeat for the Allies that Germany was almost immediately able to land her soldiers on England's southern coast and begin a march to London? The women of the isolated Olchon Valley of Wales did not even have time to wonder "what if" before they woke up one morning to find that every one of their husbands and sons had vanished, leaving behind nothing to indicate where they had gone or when they might return. But Maggie, oldest of the women, knew in her heart that the men would be gone for a long time when she saw that her husband William had left their cows un-milked, something he had never done in all their years together. She was able to convince the rest of the women that their husbands had joined the resistance, something they hardly dare speak of even among themselves, and that it is their duty to work the farms on their own while their men were away. And that is exactly what they try to do until a small German patrol suddenly appears in the valley on a mission of its own. Despite the women's efforts to disguise the absence of the valley's men, Captain Albrecht Wolfram quickly reaches the correct conclusion that the women are alone and that their husbands are involved in fighting the German invasion. Albrecht knows that he should report the situation to his superiors but he realizes that, if he does so, everyone in the valley will be killed as an example of what will happen to the families of others who join the underground resistance. Albrecht has already seen the worst that war has to offer and he does not have the stomach to cause the deaths of these innocent women. He, in fact, realizes that his patrol has dropped through the cracks of the German command and decides to keep his men safely in the valley long after their initial mission has been completed. When harsh winter weather sets in, making it impossible for the soldiers to leave the valley even if they want to, both the women and the soldiers come to realize that they must depend on each other for survival. The women grudgingly reach the conclusion that their resistance is no longer possible. Out of necessity the two groups learn to accommodate each other and over the long winter months personal relationships change to the point that both sides almost forget that they are at war with each other. What they have in common is more import

Powerful and very accomplished debut novel

This is an extremely powerful story set in the imagined backdrop of an invaded and Nazi-occupied Britain, from 1944 onwards... an alternative outcome for the Second World War which could quite conceivably have come true. After failed D-Day landings the German invasion begins in earnest on British soil and this story unfolds as the country gradually becomes another occupied territory of the Third Reich - herein lies its power and horror. One morning, in one of the most remote valleys in the Black Mountains on the English-Welsh border, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Lewis awakes unusually late in the day to find her husband has disappeared. Suspicions are confirmed as all the women in the valley meet to find that all seven men in the valley have literally vanished overnight. The women fear that their husbands have joined an underground resistance group... and they are left to tend their farms, taking on the full heavy workload previously undertaken by the men. Fear and mistrust envelops them when a German patrol arrives in the valley on an important mission, until an uneasy truce is formed from a mutual need for help during the harsh frozen winter months in this isolated valley of the Black Mountains. The men in the patrol are war-weary and glad of their respite from the fighting; the women are struggling with their workloads.... both sides have a tendency to forget that there is a war on, and this could be a very dangerous thing to forget indeed. Owen Sheers (also poet) writes in a beautifully lyrical way, vividly bringing to life the Olchon valley. The power of the novel lies in its ability to shock, as the slow realisation gradually dawns that this outcome could have been the one to come true... An idea that stays with you long after turning the last page. I did hestiate before giving it 5 stars because I didn't find it quite as compelling a read in the first half, as in the second; the pace was slightly lacking. However, what it loses in pace it really does make up for in prose and description. A good read for anyone. I'd especially recommend it for young students of the Second World War, if only to see the Nazi occupation of other European countries in a different light, and perhaps even bring their history more vividly alive.