The Sound of the Hours
Karen Campbell
Bloomsbury
The medieval Tuscan town of Barga, nestled in the hills above Lucca, is the Scottish capital of Italy. For a hundred years Italians have left Barga, and Scots have returned; in this wee mixing pot Karen Campbell sets her artful and panoramic novel of antifascism, loss and love, The Sound of the Hours.
It is 1943, and years of war have ground down the inhabitants of Barga, and defined the teenage life of Vita Guidi. Her mother’s wedding ring has been given willingly to the fascist war effort, food is running short, and as the Nazis approach, her own life-story, heading inexorably towards marriage with her Scottish-Italian cousin Giuseppe (Joe), is beginning to feel hollow. Painful years of oppression, resistance and liberation are advancing on this small Tuscan town and an unimaginable new life awaits Vita and her young sister.
Campbell however does not construct a story of pure good and evil amidst the Italian hills, instead the narrative of the honourable allies and hateful fascists is problematised. That is not to say that the author for a second stumbles into fascist apologism, but that the nobility of the liberating allies is shattered. We follow Frank, a young Black GI who struggles to come to terms with his own position as a soldier liberating Europeans from fascism, whilst he faces American apartheid back home. We find Vita’s own family divided between those craving the glory of the fascisti, and those risking their lives to save the fascist’s victims, and we meet Joe from Paisley who has fled Scotland after his own family has been interred – and worse – as enemy aliens. The Sound of the Hours allows no space for black and white, and instead paints a passionate and moving picture of the Italian experience in the Second World War, and the way in which the terrible false logic of fascism and racism can pervade a society.
The strength of the novel however lies not just in its sophisticated and sensitive portrayal of the overlapping oppressions in Italy, America and Scotland, but in its sharp and vivid depiction of village life. The tensions, gossips, heroes and villains of Vita’s village drive the narrative and enact a microcosm of the wider war around them. Priests, neighbours, partisans, musicians, and murderers switch sides, make compromises and provide a vivid backdrop that gives depth and pathos to the central story of secret love.
Whilst those without the constitution for it might find some of the more romantic passages of The Sound of the Hours to be saccharine rather than sweet, the book is a romance in the fullest sense of the word, an epic of love, honour, betrayal evil, and redemption. Karen Campbell’s novel is a meticulously researched, timely, and expansive book that sucks the reader into a world where we can see the best and worst that people can be in these cruel times. — Yok Yok