The Kissing Gates - Mackenzie Ford

The title, premise and cover of The Kissing Gates gives the promise of a classic wartime romantic melodrama and Mackenzie Ford’s debut certainly does that, but it also has much more to offer the reader.

The particular love-triangle set-up, during the First World War, could hardly be more dramatic and involved. While entrenched on the front on that famous Christmas in 1914 when the British and German trips ceased hostilities for a brief period to exchange gifts and seasonal goodwill, Lieutenant Harry Montgomery, known as Hal, meets his German counterpart and is charged to carry to carry out an unusual request – to bring back a photo to an English girl he was engaged to in Stratford-upon-Avon before the war broke out. Invalided from the war soon afterwards however Hal looks Sam up, but falls in love with her himself and doesn’t reveal to her that he met her fiancé Wilhelm on the front. As the war drags on however, Hal realises that Sam just cannot forget Wilhelm.

The romantic complications of such a set-up are obvious and the author does a fine job of making the contrivances and coincidences that inevitably occur seem relatively convincing. Mainly this is achieved through good characterisation and a superficial but accurate examination of the psychology and behaviour of people during the war and in matters of love, the two combined creating – as it did with Sarah Waters’ WWII novel The Night Watch – an intense and explosive situation of necessarily suppressed passions. Crucially, it’s about the human cost of both, of the war as well as the profound impact it has on society and people’s lives.

As well as the romance, the period is filled out with a lot of background detail, family drama, espionage, and war news, all mostly well integrated into the story, although Hal’s sister’s letters as a nurse on the front can be a little too expositional. Certainly, with a ticking time-bomb of an undisclosed photograph ever present it’s all heavily romanticised, but it makes for a rich and deeply involving novel.

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