Charlotte Richmond, the protagonist of Jo Baker’s affecting novel, The Midnight News, seems to carry a curse. The curse doesn’t strike Charlotte directly; instead, it seems to hit the people closest to her. It isn’t until later that we see that the curse didn’t just start when the Blitz commenced in the fall of 1940. This isn’t to say that Charlotte waltzes through the bombardments unscathed. Seeing death take her friends and family sends Charlotte into a tailspin, one that can only be halted when she manages to find people who can give her the kind of help she really needs.
When we first meet Charlotte, she’s doing alright for herself. She has her own room with a very kind landlady. She has a job where she can muddle along until her typing improves. It’s nothing fancy, not like her life with her appalling father, the baronet, and her equally appalling sister. And Charlotte has her friends and work buddies, although neither of them seems to have much time for Charlotte lately. Nor does Charlotte’s Bohemian godmother, who is quarreling with her latest lover when Charlotte drops in for tea and sympathy. Within pages of the beginning of The Midnight News, German bombs start to fall and Charlotte begins to lose people in rapid succession: her best friend, an old schoolmate, her work friend, and her godmother.
Grief can do strange things to people. In Charlotte, grief takes the form of voices in her head and a suspicion that the deaths might not have been the result of bombing injuries. That she can’t get anyone to really believe her makes it all worse, as does the fact that Charlotte had previously been sent to a mental asylum after the death of her mother and brother a few years earlier. Charlotte has known a lot of loss and all everyone can seem to say is some variation on stiff upper lips and offers of tea. Everyone, that is, except for a charming young man named Tom who Charlotte sees feeding the pigeons along her walks through London’s streets. Tom and Charlotte have an instant connection, one that grows deeper once they start to do more than nod to one another while they’re out and about.
The Midnight News kept me guessing for a long time. Was this a mystery? Was it a psychological portrait of a woman breaking down under stress and sadness? Would it be a harrowing account of life in England’s brutal asylums, in the days when psychiatrists were experimenting with dangerous insulin comas and electroconvulsive therapy? Was it a love story? Would there be a bit of espionage? At the risk of saying too much, there are elements of all of these genres in The Midnight News. And I was utterly hooked on this chameleon of a novel.
Readers who like unique historical fiction will enjoy this one. It refuses to do what you expect it to while, at the same time, deliver a satisfying and original story about a protagonist you can’t help but fall a bit in love with.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.