Beejay Silcox
When is a lovely novel too lovely? Too frictionless, too perfectly smooth. It takes skill to make a book feel effortless. But when do a novel’s pleasures begin to feel like a failure of imagination?
I’ve been thinking about this question all year, as some of the most beloved names in fiction have released novels of lavish and luxurious comfort. There was Ann Patchett’s Whistler, so wilfully pleasant – so stuffed with little joys – it felt like a high-end gift basket. And then Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, which promised something wild and strange but then gave us the familiar consolations of a family saga.
And now there’s Pip Williams’ The German Ward, the story of an English nurse and a German doctor who serve together in a field hospital in Etaples, a few miles behind the Western Front. Two restless souls, alone on the night shift – those dark, suspended hours (“There is no after. There is only now”).
It is exactly the book you expect it to be. I’m tempted to leave it there and let readers bring their own appetites to the novel. The more I explain, the more my own unmet hungers gnash and gnaw. My hunger for risk, for mess – for the kind of moral ugliness that shakes my certainties loose.
Like so much contemporary WWI fiction, The German Ward is terribly beautiful, even as it tries to be honest. When it comes to the Western Front, there’s a stubborn smear of Vaseline across our cultural lens. We look at the carnage and keep spotting love stories. Some readers will find this reassuring; humane, even: a reminder that gentleness has its place in ungentle times. Others will bristle at yet another romance plucked from the fetid mud. Both can be true. In a way, that’s Williams’s point: the tension between what we choose to see and what’s there. How our perspective shifts and warps depending on where we stand, what uniform we’re wearing and who we love. To make the point, she gives us double vision: two women looking at the same story from opposite ends of a century.
In 1937, an unexpected letter prompts Tilda Taylor to open a box of relics she has kept in the attic for 20 years, among them her wartime diary. It begins in August 1915, with her assignment to the titular German ward, where wounded enemy soldiers were sent to recover before being transferred to prison camps. “We had tried to kill them but they didn’t die,” Tilda’s diary reads, “so now we try to save them. How insane.”
In 2025 art historian Eva LaMotte is in the archival quiet of the Australian War Memorial, studying the work of Iso Rae, an Australian artist who was based in Etaples during the war but denied a formal commission. Rae’s work carries a quiet defiance: “Someone had said no to Iso – the war is not yours to paint; it is not your story to tell – but Iso had done it anyway.” What did she see, Eva wonders, that the men did not? Only a handful of Rae’s sketches survive but some of the most tender feature the same unnamed nurse. Eva senses a story hiding in these intimate lines. As she imagines that story, Tilda remembers it. (Williams has conjured the tale from a real-life encounter in Rae’s archives.)
And so we have a novel where everyone is looking at someone who is looking at someone else. Looking, longing, sketching, interpreting. The war churns on and on, breaking bodies. And we watch them all, watching – bearing witness, bearing suffering. It could be a great, unruly tangle. But Williams knows precisely what she is doing. We can feel it: the precision, the control. The mystery of Tilda’s unopened letter; the question of Eva’s anonymous nurse. The past and the present moving towards one another like two lovers reuniting.
It’s all so carefully inevitable. Tilda is a former actress, headstrong and impatient (“one of Pankhurst’s women”). The German doctor, Hugo Henning, is taciturn and proper: “a nut to crack”. We know the archetypes; we know the script. “We kissed like we knew how it might end,” Tilda tells us, and we believe her. We already know how it will end.
Readers might remember Tilda from The Bookbinder of Jericho, Williams’ last novel. The German Ward enriches that book but stands alone. I read it alongside Daniel Kraus’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel Down, a horror novel set at the bleeding edge of the front during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. That was an unfair pairing. Kraus’ novel is so gloriously repulsive, so feral and deranged, that Williams’ doctors-and-nurses romance felt almost obscene in its tidiness. All that finely sketched yearning. All those diligent shades of ethical grey.
Tilda and Hugo clash over rules: they anchor him and suffocate her. In the ward the couple wrestles with when to bend the rules and when to break them – when protocol stands in the way of grace. “The trick is to know when the rule is worthy and when it is not,” Tilda argues. She’s right. Pip Williams knows all the narrative rules. The German Ward is perfectly lovely, perfectly readable proof. I wish she’d smashed a couple. Smashed them all.
The German Ward by Pip Williams (Affirm Press, $35) is out now.