World War II London setting, in the BBC offices. Office life and politics, and resources thinned to exhaustion and distraction. Satirical even as accurate. I've read it twice, the first time in a used large print hardback I bought online not realizing it was large print. Not large enough to read without my glasses, though, so very large print!

"By the end of August the heavy raids had begun. Vi and Annie were both out when the Simmonses' house in Hammersmith was knocked down. Mrs. Simmons and the children were quite all right, having taken shelter under the hall table, a half-size billiard table really, which was of a quality you couldn't get nowadays if you tried" (141). ( )

My first read by Penelope Fitzgerald. I found her story of wartime BBC behind the scenes surprisingly poignant and very well-written. Annie's character was utterly fascinating in an understated way that intrigued me with every scene she was in. The ending just about broke my heart. I'm looking forward to reading more of Fitzgerald's works now. ( )

This is on the surface a light-hearted look at life at the BBC during the Blitz. Lots of acronyms, things not going quite to plan, and working around the bombing of London. There are human stories in here and it has sadness as well as comedy. ( )

I don't tend to be drawn to comedic novels, but like Fitzgerald's work, and after Beth's (BLBera) recommendation I took the plunge, and enjoyed this eccentric tale of BBC personnel during WWII. Humorous it was, but underlying that were small domestic details in the lives of those under duress. Fitzgerald communicates what it felt like in homes and on the streets. And the friendships that kept an element of sanity (mostly) alive. ( )

"Human Voices" isn't a long book, and it's not a particularly difficult read. Still, I read it twice before writing this review. It is, much like its setting -- the BBC's Broadcast House during the Second World War -- an oddly self-contained and emotionally restrained novel. It's also a good one, and I'm a little surprised that less than five hundred readers have it in their libraries. Its concerns range from the BBC's arcane bureaucratic structure during this period -- which seems to have been dictated as much by tradition as much as by organizational charts -- to the nature of love and friendship. Fitzgerald uses her characters here to ask what it means to love somebody whose particulars you despise. And it's beautifully written. As is startling common in Fitzgerald's novels, there are sections that last just a few pages but describe her characters so perfectly you might as well have read an entire novel about their experiences. Her writing is, as usual, rich, dense, and marvelously accurate. More specifically, her description of how one of her characters, a certain Annie, grew up with her father, a piano tuner, and made her way to the BBC is particularly good, the sort of thing you could use as an example of what really good writing is.

But mostly, "Human Voices" is about the importance of telling the truth, which, according to the author, who worked at the BBC during this period, the Beeb committed it to doing, as much as it could. And it's also about getting the job done: this book makes you understand how aware Britons were during the Second World War of how precarious their survival was, and how doing any job took an enormous amount of mental fortitude. It's a good description of what George Orwell called "writing inside the whale," working under conditions so dangerous as to be unimaginable, yet still managing, somehow, carry on. There are some lighthearted bits in "Human Voices," but most of it is, understandably, suffused with dread. Weeks seem to last months, and months years. Characters float in and out of the story, die suddenly, or undergo huge life changes in just a few paragraphs. "Human Voices" characters know that they are living in momentous times, and, by and large, act accordingly. Many of them have flaws, but, by the time I finished this one for the second time, I had found a lot to admire about just about all of them. Recommended. ( )