An Ordinary Life

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When you boil up the spaghetti it runs like water, but then you take it out of the water and the starch makes it sick together and feel a bit sticky. True soul mate love is real and those who find it are truly blessed despite the pain that is inevitable when their soul mate dies. That could be sad, but it took strength and gumption for Molly to ultimately be happy and resigned to accept the cards she was dealt.

Carrying the weight of her decisions, the separation from her son and the horrors of the war, Molly, a very very strong woman faces a life filled with so many secrets. She is one of the most rounded characters I have read in a long time and her pure raw emotion makes her easy to relate to, even to someone who hasn’t grown up during a war or suffered that much loss.The particular beauty of the style with which the story is written is that you understand that to Molly, her life is an ordinary one. As a young woman she worked as an interpreter during WW II, fell in love with her best friends brother Johan, joined the resistance in France, worked as a POW liaison officer during and after WW II and her last job was working in the records department of a large English hospital. I would have liked those sections to be longer as I really liked seeing how she was coping with the consequences of her decision and in many ways I preferred her ordinary life to her moments of derring-do.

Molly is working for the war effort, and given her gift for languages she is actually more of an asset than she realizes. We as a society have developed such a strong desire to be more accomplished and successful in comparison to our peers. But, then I guess, to Molly and millions of others during the war it probably was just An Ordinary Life. It was very gratifying when Ram John Holder told me how authentic he thought it was: he said he’d had a landlord just like Figgis! The author brings to us the irony of the whole situation under the guise of the character having lived “an ordinary life”!I only knew her as an old lady and was very moved to hear at her funeral (which was streamed online) that in her younger days, she had been considered a real beauty, was a wonderful dancer and had a beautiful soprano voice. Based on that response alone, they instantly make judgments about our whole lives and whether or not we are good enough to be involved in their circle. I do not wish to spoil the plot for anyone who has yet to read the book, so I'll just say that after finishing the novel, Molly stayed with me, as if I'd been reading a book about a real person.