While there is no disputing the contemporary facts and news stories — the Second World War, rationing, harsh government treatment of conscientious objectors ("conchies"), racial discrimination, homophobia, Cold War militancy, McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs, air-raid drills, Korea — with which Greer sketches the background of his story, this background has a papery feel to it.
"His portrayal of conchies as camp, embroidery-loving, scent-wearing cowards does him no credit at all," concedes Clark, who portrays his subject as a man with a generous heart but some of the least attractive prejudices of his time.
Strikers, Hobblers, Conchies and Reds: A Radical History of Bristol 1880-1939 (2014) As the cultural consensus in British society moved further and further to the right, it seemed that the efforts to create a wider, more democratically inclusive history from below had bitten the dust.
I felt very sorry for some of the conchies, because, by refusing to fight, they got treated like selfish cowards, even though, for some of them, the reason they didn't want to fight wasn't that they were scared of dying, but that they didn't want to hurt other people.
For me, the conchies were also proof that there are different kinds of bravery, and that it's not because you don't throw yourself in front of the gunshots that you're not brave.
When Prior revisits the impoverished north of his childhood, when his blossoming romance in London starts to falter because of his blackouts, and when we are taken inside the prisons where 'conchies' are being systematically beaten and humilated, the novel does succeed in finding external correlatives for its psychological terrain.
