Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War by Rachel Bryan

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

Briony Tallis, the irksome thirteen-year-old writer in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), ruins the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and, to an even greater degree, Robbie Turner, by telling a lie. Because of Briony’s untruthfulness, Robbie goes to prison, then to France at the start of the Second World War, where he dies of septicaemia on the beach at Dunkirk. During her decades-long writing career, Briony creates several stories about what happened between Robbie and Cecilia in 1935. In effect, she writes “what if” versions of Cecilia’s and Robbie’s lives to atone for her guilt. These stories do nothing to change what happened. They do, however, point to the compensatory delusions that writers bear towards history.

Rachel Bryan begins Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War with Briony’s counterfactual, “what if” stories. What if Briony had been a more responsible person? What if Robbie had pursued a medical career and not died during the Dunkirk evacuation? With reference to works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Bryan draws a distinction between two kinds of counterfactual narrative, which she calls “unlived lives” and “lives unlived.” The former refers to “those forms of speculative counterfactual thinking which allow individuals to perpetuate in their imagination lives that have not been lived,” whereas the latter denotes “those acts of imagination which allow people to retrospectively cast as ‘counterfactual’ or ‘fanciful’ lived experiences that they did in fact have” (6–7). Unliving a life implies an undoing or disavowal of experiences that one wishes had not occurred. Or, as Bryan states, “lives unlived refer to past experiences, impressions, or memories whose meanings have been challenged by current events” (86).

What obligations do twentieth-century writers owe to the past? James, Bowen, and Ishiguro supply diverse answers to this question. For James, “binding yourself to the dead or to outmoded beliefs might rob you of the chance to live and to act freely in the present” (46). For Bowen, upholding traditions, especially Anglo-Irish traditions during the War of Independence in Ireland, leads to a false sense of security. Just because her family survived numerous catastrophes—she lived in fear that Bowen’s Court, her family home in County Cork, would be burned to the ground during the Troubles—does not mean that she or her house will survive the next catastrophe. For Ishiguro, counterfactual narratives allow people to acknowledge their errors and to assume responsibility for their culpability.

War leads many people to regret their actions and consequently to want to unlive their lives. James never participated in a war as a combatant, although he did write a series of essays about war that were collected in Within the Rim (1918). Bowen served as a warden for Air Raid Precautions during the Second World War; her short stories assembled in The Demon Lover (1945) and her novel about personal and national treachery, The Heat of the Day (1949), are masterpieces of war literature. Ishiguro lived the first five years of his life in Japan, and his fiction assesses the legacies of military conflict, as in “The Summer after the War” (1983) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). In an astute juxtaposition, Bryan traces Ishiguro’s engagement with the Shoah in Never Let Me Go (2005) via buried allusions to H. G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community (1955, revised 1960).

Historical information grounds Bryan’s readings of James’s, Bowen’s, and Ishiguro’s works. After the American Civil War, northern cities erected statues to the war dead, among which was Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze relief of Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, unveiled on Boston Commons on May 31, 1897. William James gave a dedicatory speech on the occasion. Henry James was not present, but he asked friends to provide him with details of the ceremony. In The American Scene (1907), he mentions that he saw Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture when he was in the US in 1903. As Bryan observes, James, in his fiction and biographical works, “recalls not only memories of the dead or of the past but traces of what once was possible, and of choices which, at the time could still have been made differently” (49–50).

Especially in his late fiction, James returns time and again to squandered opportunities or “wasted chances” (80), as Bryan calls them. In The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether counsels Little Bilham to live all he can while he is young; it is a mistake not to seize every opportunity that enhances life. In “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), Marcher never experiences deep passion; his is a life of such discretion that it amounts to avoidance of living altogether. Events that never come off circulate alongside the trajectories that characters actually follow, as befalls Spencer Brydon when he returns to New York after a life in Europe in “The Jolly Corner” (1908). Bryan also traces this Jamesian motif of missed opportunities through Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1917), a novel published hard on the heels of her critical book about Henry James (1916).

In Bryan’s account, syntax registers counterfactual possibilities. James’s late style, influenced in part by the fact that he dictated his prose to an amanuensis, has its complexities and impenetrabilities. Critics have also routinely commented on the density, hesitations, reversals, and double negatives in Bowen’s style, within which Bryan finds counterfactual alternatives: “Like the narratives of which they are the vehicles, Bowen’s sentences do settle eventually into coherent forms—yet along the way, they illustrate the torturous consequences of perpetuating imperilled conceptions and of seeking to bring disruptive perceptions and experiences to conventional order” (16). (“Tortuous” would be more apt in this sentence than “torturous.”) Especially in The Heat of the Day, this style forces readers to “absorb clauses without yet knowing quite what it is that they mean, or indeed the precise relationships (causal, chronological, spatial) between the impressions received” (174). Baffled by multiple possibilities, readers go back over sentences to see if they parse grammatically and semantically.

In itself, Bryan argues, “the counterfactual consolatory potential of beautiful prose” (210) keeps alive alternatives to what has actually happened. Even as it preserves the past, fictional prose can assuage grief for unlived lives and lives unlived. In this regard, Ishiguro is said to have a “masterful instinct for how syntax can preserve interpretive possibilities even after they are refuted on a semantic level” (191). This focus on style and syntax allows Bryan to perform virtuosic close readings of various texts. She provides an excellent reading of “rubbish,” in its material and colloquial meanings, in Never Let Me Go. Notably, she interprets imagined women’s lives in Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), “A Year I Remember—1918” (1949), and A World of Love (1955) against the “surplus women” of the interwar years, when young women imagined fallen soldiers—“silent, unknowing, and imaginatively available” (127)—as their unwedded husbands.

Sometimes Bryan’s own syntax dissolves under the strain of too many ideas pulling in opposite directions. Among different possibilities, I shall cite just one example: “In this book, I argue that in order to fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and the private imagination, we have to learn both to read for and to accept the subtly innovative qualities of texts whose modernity lies in their attentiveness to the bewilderment and vulnerability that attaches to the human mind in times of radical change, when the dawning of a brave new world still seems, in Robert Pippin’s terms, like ‘a kind of trauma and disorienting loss, not [. . .] a liberation and discovery’” (23). Although the grammatical subject of the sentence is “I,” whose relation to “we” remains nebulous, the more significant claim pertains to how war affects the imagination or how bewilderment is a response to radical change. The allusion to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel pulls attention in one direction while the quotation from Robert Pippin tugs in another. After subtracting clauses, I would summarize the sentence thus: “modern literature registers the bewilderment of people who live through war.”

Despite such lapses in clarity, the virtues of this book are many. Bryan justly points out that counterfactual versions of the self can help people arrive at moral decisions. Imagining “what if” scenarios is one way to think about the consequences of certain acts. Bryan’s argument is informed with pertinent historical information. Discussions of suicide in Germany and Japan, for instance, help clarify the moral choices that people in dire political circumstances make about lived and unlived lives. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War has no conclusion; it would benefit from a brief statement of findings. Nonetheless, it provides useful ways to talk about the ethics and consolations of counterfactuality in the long twentieth century.