Revisiting Forbidden Zones
- aksmith304
- Feb 23
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 16
I’m going to focus on the First World War for a bit in anticipation of the publication later this year of my new novel, Where No Shadow Awaits. By turns trench narrative, ghost story, murder mystery and romance, the novel follows the relationship between Joe, a young English soldier, and Gabrielle, a Belgian peasant girl living close to the front line at Ypres. Their troubled love story, told in their own words, plays out against a backdrop of the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, with repercussions that echo through the following decades.
This book has been a long time in the making. The characters of Joe and Gabrielle first evolved when I was working on my PhD which examined women’s writing and experience of the First World War. Many contemporary books inspired me. An important one was The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden, first published in 1929, which is a series of sketches and short stories set in ‘the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire’. This sets the scene within which Joe and Gabrielle’s story plays out. I talked about this book a while ago in relation to Borden’s poem ‘The Song of the Mud’ and here too, I’m interested in landscapes.
Borden captures the ‘forbidden zone’ as effectively as any writer of the First World War. She is as much a viable witness as a trench soldier.
The rain and the mud muffle the voice of the war that is growling beyond the horizon… No, there’s no frontier, just a bleeding edge, trenches. That’s where the enemy took his last bite, fastened his iron teeth, and stuffed to bursting, stopped devouring Belgium, left this strip, these useless fields, these crumpled dwellings. (p.7)
The distant war is both personified and bestial, and not distant enough. The terrible weather is a fierce adversary for both combatants and civilians alike. The landscape is wounded, bleeding from the constant savage bombardment. It lives, but it suffers. The predator enemy waits to take another bite, as the few remaining civilians vainly try to cling to their homes, their land, their lives. They share this ‘forbidden zone’ with allied soldiers and with military hospitals like the one in which Mary Borden worked, all of which squeeze them further.
This broken land, so effectively evoked in Borden’s poetic prose, is the home of Gabrielle Rochard. It is a nightmare space, rarely considered in historical fiction, containing ‘a broken fragment of a nation, lolling in it, hanging about waiting in it behind the shelter of a disaster that has been accomplished’. (p.8) Into this space come the British bringing with them danger as well as security. I’m looking forward to sharing more in the coming weeks, but for now, do take a look at the The Forbidden Zone. It’s probably my favourite book from the First World War.
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