Valentine Grey- Sandi Toksvig

Valentine Grey

Sandi Toksvig

Rating: 4/5

The short version: If you stick around to the end, this book makes every second worth it.

This review will contain spoilers.

I picked up Valentine Grey because of its author. Historical fiction isn’t something I read much of, and I especially didn’t have much of an opinion about the Boer War before I read it. But I know and admire Sandi Toksvig for her honesty, humour and openness, and the book deals with the issues of gender and sexuality- not something I’ve seen a lot of fiction dealing with. I wanted to see what Toksvig’s style was like.

It was good- not perfect, because there were issues with pacing at times, but with enough power and skill to make up for its little flaws. The critique of society is built up slowly throughout the book, and no side in the war is presented as morally superior- not even the heroine. As a queer British woman, I recognised so much of our society today in the flawed society of the book, which is set around 1900. And that scares me slightly, but the ending of the book shows that hopelessness is not the only option. That is undoubtedly deliberate given that Toksvig is also a queer British woman with an interest in seeing society change for the better.

The title character, Valentine Grey, is a young woman brought to England in her teens after spending her whole life living in India. She is educated in society life by her aunt, and forms a friendship with her cousin Reggie. Despite her reluctance, she is slowly progressing towards living her entire life in the restricted role of an upper-class woman. This is disrupted by the outbreak of the Boer War, and her decision to take Reggie’s place as a soldier. A second storyline deals with Reggie’s romance with Frank, a working class actor.

What struck me as the book finished was how Shakespearean certain elements of its plot are- explorations of gender roles, characters who layer themselves in disguises, illicit romances. The moment that most illustrated this for me was when Valentine, after a complicated set of events which expose the cruelty of the British people towards the Dutch, escapes a concentration camp dressed as a woman. She reflects that she is “a woman who had been a man now pretending to be a woman”. The complexity of her identity issues are summed up beautifully by that sentence, and I appreciated that even after Valentine could stop pretending to be a boy, she didn’t fully embrace her femininity again, either. Toksvig presents the issue of gender as much more deep than just men who fight and women who sit at home, and it enriches the emotion of the book.

I was also pleased by her determinedly grey portrayal of society. When Valentine was in London, there were a few moments which unsettled me- none of the characters questioned British imperialism, or the war it had caused. Once Valentine was at the front, though, that all changed. Valentine and her squad go through some terrible things, and the way this parallels the experiences of Reggie and Frank exposes how terribly people who deviate from the norm are treated. Notably, at exactly the point when Valentine is experiencing the full horror of war for the first time, Reggie and Frank are beginning to be ruined by their experiences.

Toksvig’s critique goes even deeper than this- when Valentine is living with a Dutch woman, one of the people she should be fighting against, she begins a relationship with a black servant. Once they are separated, she attempts to discover his fate- only to realise that she only ever knew him by a name which translates as “boy”, and he may even have felt manipulated into their relationship. That was the most moving moment of the book for me, because it showed that even the people whom the British victimised were not morally white. And none of the characters were perfect. Frank could be selfish at times, and Valentine couldn’t bring herself to talk about what she had experienced immediately after returning home.

Neither were all the plotlines given closure. But those flawed characters and the realistic ways their stories ended just made me admire the book more, and added to the emotional depth of the book. The themes it deals with are still achingly recognisable today, and if that doesn’t inspire the reader to be as brave as Valentine, then nothing will.