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Nightingale by Laura Elvery review – Florence Nightingale inspires a luminous historical novel
Elvery’s prose is both sensual and brutal in this richly imagined account of war, memory and the life of history’s most famous nurse
The year is 1850, the eve of the Crimean war, and Florence Nightingale is watching a group of boys at play. From a distance, she composes the scene, preparing to describe it in a letter to her aunt. “How did she want this part to sound?” she wonders – less concerned with what is happening than how it might be narrated. When she realises the boys are not kicking a ball but tormenting a baby owl, she doesn’t recoil. The horror of the image lands alongside another realisation: the story “might be better” now, though she is left considering how best to reframe the violence for her aunt: “Knowing she would narrate it later back in the house … Florence would have to tell the story a different way”. That instinct – to reshape the unbearable into something legible – sits at the core of Nightingale, Laura Elvery’s rich and exacting novel about violence, care and memory.
In 1910, a young English soldier, Silas Bradley, appears on Florence’s doorstep, claiming they met during the Crimean war half a century before. He’s confused, searching for answers about lives that looped briefly and painfully around his own; his appearance also forces Florence to confront ghosts in her own past.
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© Composite: Joe Ruckli/UQP
© Composite: Joe Ruckli/UQP
