A coming-of-age story in an interesting setting, The Guineveres tells the story of four girls, all named Guinevere, growing up together in a convent in the midst of World War 2. Through one set of plot twists after another, the girls wind up nursing four mysterious soldiers, injured severely in combat and delivered into the care of the convent. The book poses a series of questions about the nature of faith, hope, and love, without answering any of these questions other than to cite Corinthians.

The story is overlaid with three different layers. The first layer, which provides the chronological structure for the narrative, is the liturgical calendar of one year in the life in the convent - starting and ending with the Feast of the Assumption. The events celebrated in the liturgical calendar - annunciation, ascension, etc. - vaguely mirror and reflect the real-world events going on in the lives of the girls. The second layer tells the “revival” story - that is, the story of time before arriving at the convent - for each of the individual Guineveres. As a rule these are rather terrible stories of the girls suffering one injustice after the other until, at last, their parents or guardians decide to take them to the convent. If you like, it’s possible to read these stories as a sort of indictment of the way young girls are treated - or neglected - by the people who are supposed to take care of them. The final layer is that of the canonization tale of a wide variety of saints, each of them women who suffered some terrible fate or the other owing to an ideology that criminalizes women’s bodies. The saints’ stories are told rather matter-of-factly, with no really direct relationship to the plot or the fate of the girls, except insofar as these stories emphasize the depth of that ideology, and all of its various manifestations. You could, I suppose, read these as an indictment of that ideology - or perhaps a glorification of it. It’s difficult to say.

Indeed, there’s a great deal of ambiguity about just what, precisely, this book is driving at, and that is perhaps part of what makes it so interesting. To begin with, we are hearing the story in retrospect - a grown-up Vere is telling the story of her upbringing from the vantage point of having already lived through it, but through a distinctly teenage perspective. Whether we’re meant to sympathize wholeheartedly with teenage Vere, or whether we’re supposed to distrust her perspective (after all, she’s rather clueless about the world around her) is actually a somewhat open question, and the book’s ending doesn’t resolve that question at all. On top of that, the story is told from an imperfect first-person plural perspective, which groups The Guineveres together into a sort of single, agglomerated individual, as though the four girls are all of one collective mind. As the story proceeds it becomes increasingly clear that this perspective is flawed, and that the girls in fact do not think entirely alike, and are in fact quite different from one another. It’s easy to read this story as a sharp critique of Catholic ideology, particularly as it relates to womens’ bodies; on the other hand, it’s not altogether difficult to read this story as an apology, of sorts, for that ideology. I suppose that ambiguity is part of what makes the book worthwhile.

One thing that surprised me about the book was how little it alludes to Arthurian legend. Given that the entire premise of the story is about the name Guinevere, and that the girls (like the queen in Arthurian legend) spend time in a convent, one would assume some passing relationship with Arthurian legend. I suppose you could read the four mysterious soldiers who arrive at the convent as latter-day Lancelots, but that would be quite a stretch. Instead there are passing references to the story of the Wizard of Oz, which is a bit stranger.

I found the book rather interesting, and I particularly enjoyed the first-person plural storytelling. It is a little off-key though.