A Review of Three Books by Jonathan Hull
If you like historical fiction, and particularly historical fiction about World War I, then you’ll love Losing Julia. Told from three different time frames—during the war, ten years after, and then years later from a nursing home, Hull weaves a story filled with many memorable characters that stay with you long after the last page is turned. It’s a big, sprawling novel to get lost in, revolving around a central theme of trying to find what is lost, but never being able to and having to rely on memory and the story as consolation. Losing Julia begins in 1928 at the dedication of a memorial to the Great War in France. The protagonist, Patrick Dulaney, has come to mourn his fallen comrades, particularly his best friend, Daniel. He spies a woman in the crowd who he guesses rightly is Daniel’s great love, Julia, who Patrick falls desperately in love with. And so begins the story of great love found and lost, due to life’s obligations and trickeries. Their love is doomed, for Patrick is unhappily married with a small son, and feels the guilt and regret and will not leave his family. From the horrors of trench warfare and the friendships forged during war, to the friendships made in a nursing home, and the often comic and tragic indignities faced there, Hull gives us the life of a man who was and is filled with desire, longing, memories, regrets. The language is that good, too, and Hull’s use of figurative language that he peppers the story with.
“After we finished the brandies we walked back to the hotel, pausing to stare up at the sky, which hung over us like an immense sieve, sifting the light.”
“Daniel MacGuire and I had been up all night laying barbed wire, and now sat in a communications trench smoking cigarettes, which we kept carefully cupped in our hands like captured butterflies.
And philosophical ruminations about the nature of love and loss abound.
“So who is better off, those who share love long enough to see which parts inevitably fade or those who lose their love when it is still pristine? I think each is lonely in a different place, though if you lose your love while it is still perfect you at least have a clear explanation for your grief, while if it gradually crumbles in your hands you do not.”
“Love is the only anesthesia that actually works.”
“Without love we are like songbirds who cannot sing.”
I was a tad disappointed with a major plot point toward the end of the novel which seemed a bit contrived—an unbelievable coincidence that attempts to tie up the novel into a neat package. But all in all, Losing Julia is an exciting, full read. I wouldn’t miss it.
I was so engrossed with this love story that I immediately read Jonathan Hull’s other historical fictions, The Distance from Normandy and The Devoted, both from the perspective of two different characters retrospectively reliving their experiences during World War II. As with in Losing Julia, these books deal with characters trying to reconcile their often irreconcilable pasts with their present, at times tortured, lives. And to ultimately face the secret agonies which they all harbor: “Something lost. Or perhaps something never found. Sometimes both,” as the narrator says in The Devoted. The Devoted is particularly interesting, as it deals with the Italian front during World War II, something which I didn’t know much about. But both books, as with in Losing Julia, are about characters who must fashion a life and make sense of it post-war. And all of the characters must make sense of love, no matter the effects that war has on that love. They are all three love stories at heart and deal with the difficulties of love and loss in the midst of the tragedies of war. The characters’ present circumstances are front and center in the books—in The Distance from Normandy, a grandfather and his wayward grandson are thrown together and end up traveling together to Normandy where the grandfather fought. In a final effort to save his grandson from himself, Mead takes the teenager on a journey to the beaches, bunkers, and cemeteries of Normandy, where both of them confront the secrets they have been trying to forget. The relationship that develops between the two is heartwarming and revelatory. And in The Devoted World War II looms in the background of a present plot that involves the narrator returning to visit the dying Mike, who once rescued him from a burning car in which his parents died. The present circumstances are as intriguing as the layered past and the narrators of the books are constantly flipping back and forth between the two. “It is said that you can’t go back in life, but that’s not true,” the narrator tells us. “You can go back all right. You can go back as many times as you like. You just can’t change anything.”
A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Hull spent ten years as a correspondent at TIME, including three as the Jerusalem Bureau Chief. His reporting has ranged from the Gulf War and the Palestinian uprising to presidential politics and the troubled underside of American society. A cover story he wrote on youth violence won the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi award for magazine journalism.
A father of two, Hull lives in Sausalito, California, where he is at work on his fourth novel. The Devoted was first published in 2012, and I, for one, am anxiously awaiting his next book.
