Writing about The First World War and Time Travel
By Catherine Taylor
The First World War and time travel are not topics that, on the face of it, would seem to make good bedfellows. Agents told me as much. Though they liked my writing, they wondered how on earth such a book could be marketed. Still, that was the story in my heart – a story which just refused to let go of me. And so I wrote it anyway, and self-published.
Happily readers have taken the story to their own hearts beyond anything I could have hoped for, and confirmed what I already felt, which is that people respond to writing driven by passion. That raw, honest emotion that compels you to write is exactly what your reader wants from a book.
For me that passion was for the idea behind Beyond The Moon. The blurb is as follows: “In 1916 1st Lieutenant Robert Lovett is a patient at Coldbrook Hall military hospital in Sussex, England. A gifted artist, he’s been wounded fighting in WW1. Shell shocked and suffering from hysterical blindness life seems increasingly hopeless.
“A century later in 2017, Louisa Casson has just lost her beloved grandmother – her only family. Heartbroken, she drowns her sorrows in alcohol on the South Downs cliffs – only to fall accidentally part-way down. Doctors fear a suicide attempt, and Louisa finds herself involuntarily admitted to Coldbrook Hall – now a psychiatric hospital.
“Then one day, while secretly exploring the old hospital’s abandoned wing, Louisa hears a voice calling for help, and stumbles across a dark, old-fashioned hospital room. Inside is a mysterious, sightless young man, who tells her he was hurt at the Battle of the Somme, a WW1 battle a century ago. And that his name is Lieutenant Robert Lovett…”
Robert and Louisa, as you can imagine, end up falling in love. But then Robert disappears, and Louisa has to go back in time to WW1 to find him, becoming a military nurse at the battle front in the process, a transformation which, of course, challenges her beyond anything she could ever have imagined.
So where did this story come from? Primarily it came from my lifelong obsession with WW1. It’s fascinated me ever since I first read Wilfred Owen’s heartbreakingly beautiful poem “Strange Meeting,” at school. Over the years I came into contact with WW1 over and over again, through writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, and most importantly Vera Brittain, whose devastating account of the cataclysmic effect on her generation of the war, Testament Of Youth, is the most deeply affecting piece of writing I’ve ever read and still moves me to tears years later.
Vera loses both her fiancé and her brother in the conflict and becomes a military nurse. The most vivid parts for me are those where Vera is nursing wounded soldiers, overworked and aching with tiredness, covered in blood and gore, trying to do her best amid the sheer influx of casualties.
Central to all these accounts is the theme of a generation let down and deceived by their elders, sent off with their heads filled with noble ideas of patriotism and duty, to die in the most appalling war the world had ever known, a new, “modern” kind of war characterised by trenches, mud and appalling, newfangled weapons like machine guns, against which mere human bodies stood little chance. It was slaughter on an industrial scale. Wilfred Owen talks of “the pity” of war, and the fact that he finds his poetry “in the pity”.
This sense of pity is, I think, somehow at the heart of that terrible war and how we remember it. And it has affected me so deeply and for so long that I felt compelled to write about WW1 as my first foray into fiction.
The idea for the story had been germinating in my mind for around ten years before I sat down to write it. Robert is, I think, a composite of the many young, Edwardian gentleman officers, whose intelligent and sensitive accounts of WWI I’ve read – the so-called ‘Lost Generation’. They were truly a class apart, brought up to believe in qualities like patriotism, courage, selfless service, leadership and character. As with Robert the welfare of the men under their command is usually their chief preoccupation.
And I think Louisa was perhaps born of a desire to somehow go back to the Great War myself. I’ve always loved magic realism and time travel in novels, and to me Beyond The Moon is a kind of fairy story, a “What if?” on a grand scale. What if someone was wrongly confined to a mental institution? And what if they really did then think they were beginning to go mad, starting to see ghosts? And what if the delusion – if that’s indeed what it is – became more compelling than reality? (As you might imagine, I’m also greatly interested in mental health issues.) How might two damaged people create a safe, alternate reality for themselves? There’s also a role in the novel for the idea of reincarnation, which goes a long way to explain what’s happening, and moves the novel into the realms of the mystical.
One of the things I enjoyed most was working out how a modern-day woman would respond to the challenges of living in the past – getting to grips with 1917 medicine (Louisa is a former medical student so luckily has a head start!), managing without modern-day conveniences and technology, washing and drying one’s hair and even putting on a corset.
Researching the historical detail has been absolutely the best part, and I’m doing it all over again in my next book, which this time is set in WW2. It’s inspired by my having grown up in Guernsey with the relics of the German Occupation all around (something that, incidentally, also eventually inspired me to do a degree in German). There’s no magic realism involved this time, but it’s another real passion project. And of course I’m crossing my fingers that readers will once again respond with the same passion that I’m putting into writing it.
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BEYOND THE MOON
*Longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize 2019
A strange twist of fate connects a British soldier fighting in the First World War in 1916 and a young woman living in modern-day England a century later, in this haunting literary time travel novel.
Two people, two battles: one against the invading Germans on the battlefields of 1916 France, the other against a substandard, uncaring mental health facility in modern-day England. Part war story, part timeslip, part love story – and at the same time a meditation on the themes of war, mental illness, identity and art, Beyond The Moon is an intelligent, captivating debut novel, perfect for book clubs.
“Historical fantasy at its very best.” — Historical Novel Society”
*Shortlisted for the Eharmony/Orion Love Story Prize 2019
“Taylor’s accomplished, genre-bending book succeeds as a WW1 historical novel and a beguiling, time travel love story… The sharply written narrative deftly moves back and forth between the past and present.” — Kirkus Reviews
“An unflinching portrait of the horrors of war, and a look at the torturous extremes a human soul can endure. It is a sonnet to the transformative power of love, even as it is also a criticism of the futility and pointless destructiveness of war.” — Shaylin Gandhi, author of By The Light of Embers
In 1916 1st Lieutenant Robert Lovett is a patient at Coldbrook Hall military hospital in Sussex, England. A gifted artist, he’s been wounded fighting in the Great War. Shell shocked and suffering from hysterical blindness he can no longer see his own face, let alone paint, and life seems increasingly hopeless.
A century later in 2017, medical student Louisa Casson has just lost her beloved grandmother – her only family. Heartbroken, she drowns her sorrows in alcohol on the South Downs cliffs – only to fall accidentally part-way down. Doctors fear she may have attempted suicide, and Louisa finds herself involuntarily admitted to Coldbrook Hall – now a psychiatric hospital, an unfriendly and chaotic place.
Then one day, while secretly exploring the old Victorian hospital’s ruined, abandoned wing, Louisa hears a voice calling for help, and stumbles across a dark, old-fashioned hospital room. Inside, lying on the floor, is a mysterious, sightless young man, who tells her he was hurt at the Battle of the Somme, a WW1 battle a century ago. And that his name is Lieutenant Robert Lovett…
For fans of Kate Quinn, Sebastian Faulks, Diana Gabaldon, Ken Follett, Beatriz Williams, Kristin Hannah, Susanna Kearsley and Paullina Simons.
*NB Contains graphic descriptions of war violence and injuries, as well as profanity and mild sex.
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Bio: Catherine Taylor was born and grew up on the island of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. She is a former journalist, most recently for Dow Jones News and The Wall Street Journal in London. Beyond The Moon is her first novel. She lives in Ealing, London with her husband and two children.
Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/catherine_taylor_author/
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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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