After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh

May– june 2012 69 Simon Armitage Seeing Stars: Poems Knopf Simon Armitage combines elements of satire, wit, personality, and fantasy in this compilation of poetry. Often humorous, this collection captures a multitude of different voices and playfully illustrates them in short vignettes. Armitage has published twelve other books and made the shortlists for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Simonetta Agnello Hornby The Nun Antony Shugaar, tr. Europa Editions Set in nineteenth-century Italy, this novel encapsulates the story of Agata Padellani in her journey from wealth to joining a convent against her will. While Agata appreciates aspects of being a nun, she still longs for the world outside the convent. The book won the 2011 Italian Pen Prize for the Novel. Nota Bene Bobbie Ann Mason. The Girl in the Blue Beret. New York. Random House. 2011. isbn 9781400067183 Bobbie Ann Mason assigned herself a difficult project in this novel: to honor the memory of her father-inlaw , who crashed in Belgium in World War II, and to equally honor those whose stories he can’t have known, the many people who helped him escape capture by the Germans. The project involved research, reflected in the bibliography at the end of the novel—traveling to France to interview people involved in the Resistance and to search for women who had been youthful guides for the aviators, to match her father-in-law’s memory of a particular girl in a blue beret who helped him in Paris. Marshall, a retired airline pilot, journeys back to the crash site in Belgium , in part to locate the people— Belgian and French—who helped him get to Spain, away from the occupied zone, but also to lay some ghosts to rest. His role in crashing the bomber troubles him; ironically, while he comes to understand better the limits to what he could have done then, he learns new stories of the hardships and casualties visited on those who helped him and many other aviators. In structure, Marshall’s own story of discovery, of learning to live on his own in France as he conducts his search, becomes effaced by a very sobering extended story of imprisonment , death, and suffering by one of the Resistance survivors. He becomes secondary, being at some loss as to what to say. The growing relationship between teller and hearer doesn’t quite sustain a balance. Readers of Mason’s other stories and novels will perceive a constriction of her art due to the seriousness of the subject. This was not the occasion to include much in the way of irony, turns of phrase, or humorous characters. One understands why the character of Marshall might lack appeal, although he seems an apt representative of a generation of men emotionally muted by war. Possibly the novel will serve somewhat the same function as In Country served for Vietnam vets: to help the children and grandchildren of World War II airmen better understand their experiences and the sacrifices of those who helped them escape when their planes went down. The Girl in the Blue Beret slackens its narrative drive when Marshall is slowly adjusting to French life and learning the fates of various people, but the opening and climactic chapters are quite compelling. Layering past and present is effective in his visit to the crash site, the survivor’s story, and the retracing of his escape route over the Pyrenees. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Maureen F. McHugh. After the Apocalypse. Easthampton, Massachusetts . Small Beer Press. 2011. isbn 9781931520294 Look on the back cover of Maureen F. McHugh’s new collection of stories, After the Apocalypse, and you’ll find a list of places she’s lived—New York; Shijiazhuang ,China;Ohio;Austin,Texas;and Los Angeles—and a list of alternativereality games she’s worked on: Halo 2, TheWatchmen,andNineInchNails.These are important things to know because McHugh (author of the Story Prize– finalist MothersandOtherMonsters) uses the brickwork of her experiences—that tired adage writewhatyouknow comes to mind—to explore the unknowns of living in a postapocalyptic society, creating a world in which zombie-infested cities become prisons and people can fly

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