Young lovers, war’s chaos

The Cipher
by Genni Gunn

Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2024
$22.95 / 9781773241425

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

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“Ah, love, let us be true to one another,“ writes Matthew Arnold in his haunting poem,“Dover Beach.” His plea is urgent because the entire world, he grieves, is but “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” 

From the ancient Greeks to modern times some of our most affecting writing has been about the yearning for love in a world riven by the “ignorant armies” of war. Works as diverse as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, more recently, The Sorrow of War by Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh are just a few that make art from this human tragedy.

In The Cipher, Vancouver writer Genni Gunn, like so many before her, writes of love battered by war. Given the nature of war, many of the conflicts in her storyline are not unexpected. Yet Gunn’s approach is distinctive in two key ways. First, hers is deeply personal: discovering in some papers of her long-deceased Italian father clues about his activities in the Second World War, she has created a chief character who, in some ways, as she says, she imagines to be her father. Further, in those same papers she found evidence that her father had been “recruited into Churchill’s Secret Army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight a clandestine, guerrilla war against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists.”

Likewise connected to the author’s own family background is the treatment of the comparatively little-known tangle of internecine conflicts in the northeast of Italy, both during and immediately following the war. The substantial body of research along with her imagined identification with her chief characters results in a novel that feels both authentic and illuminating.

Key narrative decisions give further distinctive colour and shape to this novel. For one thing, Gunn implants into the storyline of the distant past passages of writing that she calls “intermissions,” narratives set long after the war written from the perspective of the adult daughter of one of the protagonists. Starting with the grim view that her father was a “monster,” the daughter nevertheless launches into her research, trying “to divine their secrets … trying to position the clues within the folder of my father’s life.”  These leaps in perspective give almost wrenching poignancy to the reader’s full emotional immersion in the living minds, so many years earlier, of a Nino and his beloved Olivia.

In addition, the author’s shifts in narrative point of view between Nino and Olivia allow her to exploit the dramatic irony arising from each of the two main character’s attempts to penetrate the veils, and even walls, that often separate them. From the beginning, Olivia, an English girl of Italian parents, is separated from her entire family in the early stage of the war. Her conscription into the SOE is provoked in part by her extraordinary powers of memory (itself a major theme of the novel). At first, her conscription seems utterly remote from Nino’s parallel life. An orphan raised in Italy by his beloved aunt, Nino is initially swept into the fascist army that he loathes, before he, too, becomes part of the SOE. 

Even as the two protagonists meet and re-meet, the shifting points of view allow Gunn to dramatize cross currents of understanding, misunderstanding, and, often, complete lack of knowledge of each other’s lives. At one point, for example, Gunn jumps months forward from Olivia’s perspective into the mind of Nino, only to reveal that Olivia has been missing for three months. Such disorientating shifts, needless to say, give the reader an almost visceral sense of the chaotic reach of war.

Other inventive techniques further deepen the impact of the writing. In the chapters from Olivia’s point of view, Gunn brings the reader particularly close to the raw stuff of her protagonist’s consciousness by writing sections in italics, some of them flashbacks, some of them deeply felt monologues. Elsewhere, she creates an almost opposite effect by interrupting the narrative with chunks of text in a typewriter font. One of these might matter-of-factly state official SOE practices, another the brutal Nazi protocols in handling noncompliant Italian villages. 

Jumps in perspective extend to jumps in place and time indicated by the chapter headings. The biggest jump, between the first part of the novel and Part 2, the period after the war, is, in many ways, the most affecting. In Part 2, for example, the scene shifts to 1948, then 1952-4, before being interrupted by an “intermission” set in 2010 and, later, 2023.

One additional narrative element deserves special mention because it shows how much the author is working to craft her novel. A wristwatch, given to Nino in a moment of intense emotion, moves from character to character, until, in the end, it pulls the threads of their lives into line. Clearly, here is an author who has thought, and rethought, how to shape her narrative and reach her readers.

Most fundamental to the dramatic impact of the story is the way that Gunn creates protagonists who feel extraordinary depths of emotion. Both, for example, feel their identity to be perilously vulnerable: characteristically, Olivia at one point cries that she has felt her “sense of self destroyed,” and, at another, that “she had become untethered from herself.” Nino, is, if anything, even more volatile; at the death of his aunt “he found himself unmoored.” He feels, “He had crossed a boundary and would never be able to return to himself.” Elsewhere Nino’s strong emotions turn to fury. Forced to fight alongside the fascists he hates, he rages, “Nothing made sense. Death and destruction. Folly upon folly.” 

Even when missing Olivia, he succumbs to “fits of fury against himself, against everyone, against this wretched war …. he struggled, his heart bleak as the sky.” This particular kind of self-directed fury, the tendency to lash out at himself, is mirrored by Olivia’s relentless guilt. In one incident, for example, after narrowly escaping from a failed covert operation, she repeats, “This is my fault, all my fault.” So intense is her emotion that “guilt threatened to submerge her.”

Needless to say, these depths of emotion supercharge the whole love story: Gunn could hardly have created two protagonists better shaped to elevate a story of mutual attraction into something writ large. She unhesitatingly gives her couple the primary traits of high romance: Nino is “handsome” and “smart, charming, [and] easygoing,” the centre of female attraction wherever he goes. Olivia, likewise, is “beautiful”: “her pale lucent skin and chestnut waves set off the green of her eyes.”

Appropriately, their initial attraction to each other is instant and intense: phrases like “inexplicably drawn” are typical. Their love letters and private thoughts likewise are charged with language at its most elevated. Nino writes to Olivia, “You are mine. You are everything. You alone can have me, not only with the senses, but with all my soul ….” His feelings are reciprocated: “all her being longed for him.”

If these basics governed the whole story, though, the novel would not make nearly the impact that it does. Gunn is at pains to write of a relationship that is intensely complex and intensely uncertain. First, both have relationships with others from the period before the war, and, deeply emotional as they both are, both feel, to different extents and in different ways, that these other relationships cannot be simply forgotten. Second, of course, the chaos of war, where each is moved from one operation to another, makes the relationship feel almost impossible. Yet, strikingly, coincidental pushes and pulls can throw the two together: at one point, for example, Olivia is assigned to a rescue mission, only to discover that one of those to be rescued is none other than Nino. A happy ending? Hardly. 

What makes the love story most distinctive, though, is that Gunn (Permanent Tourists) positions much of the conflict and complexity in the inner lives of the protagonists, a place fraught with “hesitation, reluctance, fear.” In fact, the very traits that make her characters most laudable in many ways also make their relationship most difficult. At one key moment, Nino suddenly is “unsure of himself, afraid to trust his emotions.” He feels “as if his emotions were a series of ciphers needing reverse engineering to be read. How far back would he have to go to code-break himself?” As Olivia writes despairingly, “are we destined to run along parallel tracks?” or, as she says at another turning point, “It seems we’re always out of synch.” Even when their lives have fully converged, the strongest and most intense romance is twisted with jealousy and suspicions. 

Intensifying the effect of these vicissitudes, the author drives the wedge of time through the relationship—penetrating their feelings, thoughts, memories, and firmly held values, until they reach the end of their deeply affecting story. 

As much as this is a novel about a love relationship, though, it is also a novel about war. Gunn’s treatment is wide-ranging and nuanced, but she novelizes war in three main ways.   

First, she uses conflict to create suspense. Incidents of hair-raising anxiety might take the form of her characters taking on secret identities, for example, or of Nino dropping by parachute into a tragic situation where he must choose between saving the mission or abandoning a comrade. Nazi atrocities are never far from the action nor horrific battle scenes, most powerfully documented in an air attack on Bari.

Second is what Gunn emphasizes about what war can do to the people caught within it. One of the worst consequences, as she sees it, is the nightmare of uncertainty. While Nino’s not knowing what happened to Olivia at one point has him cry out,“I need to know what happened,” many others drift in a sea of uncertainty: “To this day, they had no idea what had happened to Aldo. Nor to Mick, who was MIA and presumed dead. Nor to Barbara, for that matter. The missing, the loved ones, were scars on [Olivia’s] heart.”  

The uncertainty becomes, for vast numbers, devastating emptiness. Nino “saw himself unanchored, rootless, like others scattered by war across cities, countries, continents.”  “Historical atrocities, he thought, are like inheritances passed down one generation to the next, leaving everyone wavering in the midst of everywhere and nowhere.” This kind of epic sweep over suffering humanity perhaps reaches its peak in Olivia’s description of a death camp with “the women shellshocked, tortured, missing limbs, moaning and crying out against invisible attacks.”

Third, and perhaps most distinctive to this novel, is what Gunn illuminates about the hornet’s nest of conflicts within the internecine violence in Italy in general, and in the northeast in particular: “that particular area of Italy—the Friulini-Venezia Giulia—was mired in ethnic and territorial conflicts. The Osoppo Brigades were also at odds with the Garibaldi Brigades, and the Slovenian-Yugoslav partisans.” This tangle of loyalties during the war is mirrored, as Gunn documents it, in the “fractured times” afterwards. “Antifascists, communists, neo-Nazis, Slovene Italians—everyone against everyone else.” And to give this confusion personal focus, Gunn writes of Nino, even after the war, having “to navigate the treacherous pits of underground organizations, dark networks, weapons depots.”

This personal focus is salient. The protagonists’ entire war experience has, as the title suggests, been shot through with “ciphers”—not just the encoded messages in which they work, but, more personally, the ciphers of affection that they transmit between each other when separated. Just as Nino feels part of a different kind of cipher he would have to “code-break” to understand himself, Olivia looks back at her most powerful time as “a cipher in her heart.” In the end, no matter what Gunn illuminates about war—and that is considerable—probably what will linger longest in the hearts and minds of the readers will be the story of Nino, a distant partial echo of the author’s own father, and Olivia, the woman whom he loves to the end of his days.

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Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (Heritage House, 2012), Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. He has reviewed books by Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, Tim Bowling, Lisa Brideau, Deborah Willis, Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, Darrel J. McLeod, and Max Wyman for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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