AND IN THE MORNING (UQP 2026) by Lenny Robinson collates three stories of women and men (often sons) woven together into a compelling tale of love, sacrifice, desire, grief and survival.
The first story, set in 1919, sees Lily and her three-year-old Teddy rushing through the streets of Melbourne to welcome home her husband Bert who has returned from the war and never met his son. Four years of trauma in the Middle East has irrevocably changed Bert, and the fledgling romance and passion he and Lily shared before he left is now complicated by the addition of Teddy, and the hurt Bert carries from the war.
The second story is also set in Melbourne, during World War Two, on the eve of what many suspect may be a Japanese invasion. A young servicewoman, Frankie, is celebrating a night of leave when she meets an airman at a dance. The juxtaposition of the heavy seriousness of war and the spontaneous flirtation of a romantic spark makes for strange bedfellows.
The third section of the book is perhaps the most moving. In 1969, amid anti-war protests, Fran is mourning her only son and preparing for his funeral after he was conscripted to fight – and subsequently died – in Vietnam, a war nobody seems able to explain.
Each of these sections is moving and evocative, each placing the reader firmly in the time and place in which it’s set. Each involves complex relationships threaded with doubt, desire, longing, love, grief, fear, regret, worry, anger, desperation, loss and the feeling that this experience, whether fleeting or sustained, might be too much to bear.
Although I did enjoy dropping in and out of each of the main characters’ lives, I would have preferred that each section was written in one piece, rather than a chapter from each woman’s perspective, ever changing, first Lily, then Fran, then Frankie. At times I felt this pulled me out of the story. But as the novel continues, the reader begins to see threads of connection and it becomes clear that there is more binding together these three women than at first is apparent.
Robinson writes with empathy of the conflicted relationship between Lily and Bert, which had only just begun before he was whisked off to war, and the complications that arise when he returns and has to not only re-learn his love for his wife, but find love for a toddler he’s never met and who doesn’t take kindly to this man, this father, competing for the attentions of his mother.
The author also captures really well the flights and fancy of servicewomen and men on leave during the Second World War, when every day could be your last, the concept of enjoying every moment is paramount, and nobody knows what is around the corner.
But it’s perhaps Fran’s section that is most empathetic and compelling. She moves through the blurred treacle of the empty days after the news of her son’s death, and attempts to cope with the practicalities of organising his burial and contemplating her own role in his fate (should she have forbidden him to go? Could she have prevented him doing his duty even though he was conscripted? In the long history of mother-guilt, how on earth could she have allowed such a thing to happen?) I found this thread particularly intimate, gripping and powerful.
This remarkable debut incorporates authentic dialogue and high emotion with the delicate minutiae of living, and the forces greater than ourselves that control our lives and set us on paths not of our own making. A heartrending and moving story of love and loss.