How I Live Now
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (Penguin Books)
This review first appeared in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2005.
How I Live Now is a gutsy work of fiction. It begins with a familiar premise: pampered New York teenager, Daisy, goes to stay with quaint English cousins. But writer Meg Rosoff is playing for much higher stakes than a deal with Disney. It dares to imagine a war on English soil, and asks how a modern teenager might survive in a guerilla war. The answer, as it turns out, is the same as for anyone else: with a great deal of pain, grief and emotional courage.
Soon after her arrival, Daisy’s aunt goes away to Oslo to attend a peace conference, and Daisy is left at the sprawling and beautiful farmhouse with the boys Edmond, Isaac, Osbert and their young sister, Piper.
“We didn’t get much of a chance to sit back and enjoy being orphans before things started happeningâ€, Daisy says, with casual matter-of-factness.
“The first thing that happened wasn’t our fault. That was a bomb that went off in the middle of a big train station in London the day after Aunt P went off to Oslo and something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed.â€
This is not a bleak book, and, strange as it seems, there is something occasionally funny about a sharp-tongued New Yorker describing the dirty business of modern warfare. Echoes of war haunt the early chapters, but it is vague, far-off, blurred. Daisy has a fierce eye for more immediate things, like her new extended family, the beauty of the farmlands and her own eating disorder. But this war, not in far off Afghanistan or Africa or Iraq, is in the heart of England. The fighting is described sketchily, so we have no idea of the exact nature of the in-rushing army. But neither are we gulled about war’s atrocities.
The second thing that happens is Daisy has begun a sexual relationship with her younger cousin Edmond. It should be stated that neither anexoria nor under-age and near incestuous sex are, in any conventional sense, “issues†to be “discussedâ€. These things are an assertion of a willful character, right or wrong. These choices establish a mood of desire, knocking the reader off balance, and make the story of children in wartime that follows rock with anxious emotion.
When the army takes possession of the farmhouse, the children are split up, and Daisy and Piper taken to a farm miles away. Torn from Edmond and the security of the farmhouse, Daisy is forced to negotiate the battleground that England has become. Daisy and Piper’s plight is full of danger and Rosoff conveys their fearful and hungry trek back to the farmhouse with stark, controlled realism. Their course is one of courage and love and desperation; its climax sets up an emotionally wrenching conclusion.
Rosoff brilliantly draws upon latent anxiety in the world today, of which children and teenagers are only too aware. She treats her readers with respect, with seriousness, and this book does not pull punches. How I Live Now is the kind of book that will, I think, create life-long readers. It is a book full of passion, terror and bravery. And I whole-heartedly recommend it to teenagers and to their parents.
-Mike Shuttleworth
