Guernsey—a Rich Literary Pie

by

Jason Monaghan

Editor’s Note: Most people, at least in the U.S., probably know very little about Guernsey. And that’s a shame because it’s a small place with a large literary history. That history will become better known when the inaugural Guernsey Literary Festival takes place in May. Though in each editor’s letter I link to upcoming book festivals, it is to the ones that will occur within seven days. Because Guernsey is across a very large pond from us, I wanted to highlight the literary opportunities that will be found there for those who want to make plans now to attend the festival. To tempt visitors, Dr. Jason Monaghan obliged with a delightful essay-tour.

In May, Guernsey is holding its first literary festival. Many people know the name, but would have trouble sticking a pin in a map to find Guernsey. Indeed, on ‘Facebook’, the nearest place I can choose as my hometown is ‘Guernsey, Wyoming’. It doesn’t even appear in the standard Microsoft list of countries that pops up when registering for products on-line, so we have to pretend to be in the UK.

Guernsey is an island of some 65,000 people, seven miles by five or a little bigger when the tide is out. It is the largest island in a self-governing ‘Bailiwick’ which includes Alderney, Herm and Sark. I can see the sun rise over France from my office on a clear day, but when the sun sets, its next landfall is America. Guernsey is a small, vaguely triangular patch of green at the mouth of the English Channel and to many of its residents, it is at the centre of the world.

Islands have always attracted visitors—Romans, Vikings and Normans have all paid a call. For the past 180 years since the first steamboats connected us to England we have been a tourist destination. Tourists feel they can ‘do’ an island in a few days, and also appreciate the special nature of a place surrounded by the sea, whose population have to live on their wits more than most. The special light, the rapid changes in the weather and the moods of the sea also attract the artist and the writer, from Renoir to Victor Hugo. Whether it is the imagined solitude, the colourful history or the dramatic shorelines that draw the artist, Guernsey has been the subject of more than its fair share of creativity.

Victor Hugo was exiled here in 1855 and completed Les Miserables amongst several other of his great works whilst turning his home at Hauteville House into an idiosyncratic monument to his ego. High in his studio, looking out on France, Hugo was inspired to write The Toilers of the Sea, Guernsey’s first major work of fiction. It is a book which I found quite frustrating on first read, as what promises to be a marvellously intricate picture of later-nineteenth century island society gives way to a poetic fantasy-adventure in which a lone hero battles storms, shipwreck and a man-killing octopus.

At the last count, something over 100 novels with a Guernsey setting have been published, with another couple of dozen set on the other islands. Mervyn Peake’s moral fable Mr Pye, set in Sark, stands out as one example. Peake was more famously the author of Gormenghast as well as an accomplished artist, and his work is the subject of an exhibition at the Museum in parallel to the Literary Festival.

A good quarter of the Guernsey-based novels concern ‘The Occupation’. The Channel Islands were the only British territory to be occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War and the subject provokes continuing fascination, not least amongst visitors to our museums. As there was one German soldier for every two islanders and we have no mountains or forests to hide in, any form of armed resistance was impossible. The Germans made an effort, especially at first, to behave in a civilised manner and the Allies never made more than pin-prick attacks against the occupiers. In consequence, islanders who remained were spared many of the brutalities suffered in the rest of occupied Europe, but were left for five years in an uneasy proximity to the enemy, treading a line between purely surviving and not actively collaborating. The military, social and sexual tensions provoked by such a situation remains fertile ground for the novelist; in recent years Tim Binding’s well-received Island Madness and most famously Mary Ann Schaffer & Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This last book has been so successful that our museum shop sells tie-in mugs, bookmarks, tea-towels, calendars and our archive has provided images of the Occupation for special illustrated editions. Its locations vie with the Victor Hugo trail to provide itineraries for our literary-minded visitors, and Annie Barrows is appearing at the Literary Festival.

Of the rest of the novels, there are a fair helping of children’s stories whilst historical romances such as Hilary Ford’s Sarnia make up another large slice of our literary pie. Having never been part of England, possessing a Norman-French heritage and being washed by the tide of European history for the past two thousand years, this is not surprising. We were in the midst of many tussles between England and France and C. Northcote Parkinson’s naval novels, including The Guernseyman, frequently find port here. There is even a Dr Who novella, Just War by Lance Parkin, where the Germans use the island for testing a super-weapon that will change history.

The islands also appear in passing, or under disguise in many other novels. James Herbert’s schoolgirl gorefest Moon is clearly set at a local private school, with a grisly climax at the Reservoir. The setting for J. Tickel’s Appointment with Venus is a thinly-disguised Sark;  the film of the book starred David Niven, plus my (very young) father-in-law as a German sentry.

Probably Guernsey’s most enduring favourite novel is however The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B. Edwards. Published in 1981 it tells the life story of an ‘ordinary Guernseyman’ from the early twentieth century into modern times (i.e . the 1970’s). In his cap and blue Guernsey sweater, Ebenezer shrugs off world wars and the petty concerns of others as he works at his crab pots and tomatoes. Wry and witty, it captures the essence of the local character, or at least an archetype of what the local character is supposed to be. Indeed it is so rooted in Guernsey that I suspect that it does not travel well and people who did not know the island would not catch half the subtle jokes.

I can say little about what some would call the island’s true literary heritage, that in the language of the islands. The local language is a version of Norman-French, generally called Guernesiais, but it was never a written language. Until the early twentieth century, the  language of law and government was ‘Good French’, with the local tongue reserved for country folk. A small number of Victorian writers made valiant efforts to write down the language before it vanished in the squeeze between English and French, including Denys Corbet who referred to himself as ‘Lé Draïn Rimeux’ (the last poet). This work continues into the modern day, for example Hazel Tomlinson's P'tites Lures Guernésiaises. Heavily endangered, few people under 50 now speak more than a few phrases of the language. The Toad and the Donkey by Geraint Jennings and Yan Marquis is a newly published anthology of Norman writing fresh on the market.

For well over two hundred years the islands have spawned numerous writers of non-fiction. Indeed the local studies section of our two libraries bulge with shelves of archaeology, history, natural history and all forms of learned scientific investigation. In recent years there has been an explosion of locally written, small print-run books with the word ‘Guernsey’ or ‘Bailiwick’ in their title. Trams, tomatoes, bonnets, butterflies…the output by enthusiasts for these subjects is considerable. Inspiration is all around us and again, an attraction for authors based on an island is that you can ‘do’ a book whose scope is encompassed by a small geographic area. The Rocks of Guernsey would be a far less daunting task than, say, The Rocks of Britain. There is the added bonus that the subject will probably not already have been trampled over by well-funded academics or big publishers from England.

Nostalgia has never been as good as it is at present. A steady stream of books about the Occupation continues to fill the shelves. Diaries and anecdotes of those who lived through the war years pop up with some regularity, although we are sadly now losing the wartime generation. Molly Bihet’s A Child’s War is a good example. New histories of the occupation are still being produced, such as Madeleine Bunting’s controversial A Model Occupation which touched several raw nerves.  Specialist publications for the WW2 buff concern the German fortifications, shipping, U-boats and so forth.

Following on from the 1940’s nostalgia has been a new boom in reminiscences such as George Torode’s Donkeys Ears Ago series. These develop the idea of a typical Guernseyman exemplified by Ebenezer le Page, which is now fading into the past as the island is now home to far more merchant bankers than fishermen. These books prove popular with local readers plus the tourists who want more of the local colour. Our two high street book shops are well stocked, and you won’t find a lot of these titles on Amazon.

So we have an island of writers—a poet’s circle, a writer’s circle, playwrights, short film producers and an active ‘learned society’. So much literary output almost creates a fake history of the islands, which prompted me to make my own contribution to local fiction with Islands That Never Were. An island is however a poor place to try to build a writer’s career from, as I have found to my annoyance. That hundred miles of water separates us from publishers, agents, booksellers and audience. With echoes of Victor Hugo, it is easy to feel like a writer in exile. In these circumstances, and with this glorious scenery and fascinating history just outside the study window, it is hard for one’s writing not to become parochial. Whilst waiting for responses from UK publishers for my own last novel I wrote a short history book The Story of Guernsey which swiftly sold 1,000 copies and is now going into French translation. A Guernsey historical novel is bubbling under… it’s very tempting.

A UK editor suggested to me a few years back that what was needed was a novel set during the Occupation, but I told her it had been done to death. A couple of years later, and without warning…Potato Peel Pie…is served up from nowhere. How wrong can you be?

Note: Further reading: D. King (1987) ‘The Imaginative Literature of the Channel Islands’, Transactions of La Societe Guernesiaise, XXII Part II, 274-295

Dr Jason Monaghan is Museums Director for Guernsey. He is the author of a number of archaeology and history books and articles. As Jason Foss has had five thrillers published, and he is a member of the UK Crime Writers’ Association.