Dover Beach

Dover Beach is a 2005 fictional war novel by prolific Welsh author Leslie Thomas. It is set in Dover in 1940 and recounts the events of the beginning of World War II, colored by the author’s personal trauma from losing his father at sea while he worked as a sailor in 1943. The novel depicts ordinary people faced with the existential ambiguities and stresses of war while trying to stay alive in a besieged Britain. Thomas depicts his characters’ struggles holistically, conveying paradoxes of emotion: while they have recently experienced massive death and destruction, many of them go on to Dover and persist to have fulfilling and exciting experiences despite Dover’s proximity to the site of traumatizing war memories. Dover Beach is thus at once a humorous outlook on the wake of atrocity and a work that humanizes soldiers’ collective will for recovery.

The book begins in the summer of 1940. Dunkirk, a city in France once occupied by soldiers that Britain had just successfully evacuated despite unprecedented losses, emboldens the many other British military squads stationed in other cities. After 338,000 soldiers evacuate from Dunkirk, many of them travel through Dover on their way home, filling the city with variously ranked soldiers, both battered and celebratory. The events at Dunkirk seem to prove that they can prevail despite seemingly impossible odds. The soldiers in Dover, which sits right up against the English Channel, naively begin to explore the streets. They visit such places as the Woolworths store and skating rink. Impervious to the impending invasion and bombing, the narrator remarks on life’s adaptability to uncertainty and chaos, even death. The soldiers form friendships and celebrate life events raucously at taverns, finding comfort whenever they can.

The book’s first protagonist, a fighter pilot named Toby Hendry, is lodged in Dover waiting for further orders from his officials. He runs into someone named Giselle, a young woman from France, who has fled from France with English soldiers under the cover of a military vehicle in order to escape occupation. She joins many others who have fled from neighboring countries to patch together new lives in a place they deem safer. Hendry and Giselle begin a summer fling that Hendry compares to fantasy, perceiving it as impossibly at odds with his recent traumas. They work through these problems over time, learning about each other as they navigate the chaotic post-war Dover. At the end of their narrative, they are more well-adjusted to life in Dover.



Also in Dover is lodged a naval commander on reserve named Paul Instow. Older, and bitter about the war, Instow perceives warfare as a childish pursuit he was forced into. Instow forms a romantic relationship that parallels Hendry’s with a young prostitute named Molly. Their relationship status remains ambiguous, not only because of stigma towards prostitutes at the time, but also because Instow has just returned from a surreal war, and is unable to integrate into a relationship or reconcile his need for comfort with a prostitute whose relationships are usually transactional. Their tumultuous relationship ends more ambiguously than Hendry’s, and at the end of their narrative it is implied that Instow leaves Dover, though his destination is unknown.

The last central narrative belongs to a trio of young kids named Boot, Harold, and Spots. Poor and traumatized secondhand by stories of war and the deaths of their family members, they manage their futility by imagining participating in the war. Disobedient and obstinate to any authority, yet without true parental figures, they spend their time planning antics around the town. This narrative provides the strongest comic relief in the story. As the war continues nearby, they arm themselves with a stolen Bren gun, catapults, and other makeshift, mostly harmless weapons, and try to make haphazard escapades to the warfront, ultimately without any effect other than endangering themselves. Despite their comedic failures, they are comforted in the illusion that they are making a difference. Meanwhile, the world war that has raged finally comes to an end, liberating the town from its apprehension of tragedy.

Dover Beach is a deliberate, heavily dialogue-based, and simplistic story about war life, and post-war life, for soldiers trying to manage their trauma. The famous beach that is its namesake was an important historical site in World War II, and the narrative is drawn from actual people who settled there, some permanently, in its uncertain wake. Thomas thus combines historical research with his own emotional history of loss, and the efforts to recovery he observes in former soldiers, to create a story of survival despite all odds. In this respect, it stands with similar post-war novels in its genre as an amalgam of perspectives on a difficult subject from different sociocultural registers that aspires to convey World War II as holistically as possible.