Hanley, James No Directions

A taut novella set in a working class London boardinghouse during one night of the Blitz. From the start it is clear that the reader has not entered into the mythical World War 2 realm of, say, a Mrs. Miniver or of a John Mills “stiff upper lip” movie of the era. The boardinghouse’s inhabitants are often incoherent, frequently frightened and pretty much put personal concerns above the collective (or national) good. One of Hanley’s chief characters is “sailor,” a merchant mariner named Johns who drunkenly stumbles into the boarding house just after the air raid has begun and who interacts with several of the establishment’s inmates during the course of the long night. Johns is deathly “scared of ice” (he recounts an unsettling Arctic wartime voyage which accounts for this fear), and his introduction to the reader occurs with him sprawled in the street outside the boardinghouse in a pile of glass broken by bomb blasts; he mistakenly thinks the glass to be polar ice. Whether he was drunk at that point or injured by the bomb blast is left to the reader’s deduction, though Johns definitely gets blind drunk over the course of the ensuing night. Author Hanley skillfully describes the boardinghouse inhabitants’ rising hysteria as Nazi bombs come closer and closer to their dwelling, with the novel’s emotional center set in the building’s cellar, where all wait out the night. All survive except for “sailor,” and his enigmatic death in the cellar is not explained. Had he drunk too much liquor, or had he died from injuries suffered aboard his ship or possibly from the evening’s earlier bomb blast? Whatever the cause, Hanley has drawn Johns with compassion and the reader feels a sharp ache at his death. On a broader scale, the novella does much to dispel the often overly-sentimentalized attitudes so often seen in contemporary World War 2 fiction, and is thus most deserving of a modern audience