The Warm Hands of Ghosts

Katherine Arden

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, June 8th 2024

That people can find meaning and hope in the bleakest of times is a testament to the human spirit and the power of the imagination. It is a theme explored in The Warm Hands of Ghosts, a tale of magical realism played out on the battlefields of WWI.

The novel opens in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in January 1918, when nurse Laura Iven receives a parcel containing her brother’s belongings. It has been six months since she last saw Wilfred – Freddie – near the Belgian front in Poperinghe. Invalided home after the shelling of her field hospital, her trauma is amplified when the munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, explodes in Halifax Harbour, killing thousands, her parents among them. Rather than accept the loss of what remains of her family, she returns to the Western Front to find him. Freddie, meanwhile, has survived Passchendaele alongside an injured German soldier, and the pair are trying to make their home without being shot as deserters or enemy combatants. Stumbling into an apparently abandoned bar, they find themselves guests of the Fiddler, a legendary figure with the ability to make the war disappear for those within his walls. But it is a sanctuary that comes at just as dangerous a price. Tempted by the twin lures of safety and forgetting, Freddie surrenders his memories to his host, only to see them woven into music whose brutal beauty feeds on and amplifies the horrors of the war. 

The narrative moves between the siblings as Laura searches for her brother while he tries to hold on to the last vestiges of his identity. Meanwhile, all around them, the war plays out in vivid and realistic detail.

Arden uses the fluid nature of genre to provide glimpses of what those on the front lines must have experienced while also capturing fragments of forgotten histories of the war: this is the first time I have heard about the Halifax explosion, for example, despite it being the largest in history until Hiroshima. By combining fact and folklore, historical figures and literary allusion, she has created a novel that invokes physical and emotional truths of war that are as relevant today as they were a century ago.