SOURCE: "No Man's Land," in The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1993, p. 24.

Daughter of the seventh earl of Longford, Lady Rachel Mary Billington is an English novelist, nonfiction writer, author of children's literature, dramatist, and critic. In the following favorable review of A Very Long Engagement, she contends that the story is a morality tale about war.

World War I has always inspired writers, as if art (in particular poetry) could do something to overcome the dominance of death. The war's notorious trenches introduced a new form of horror that killed, maddened and deformed. Afterward, Europe was filled with widows, mothers without sons, sorrowing sweethearts. It is not surprising, then, that the French writer Sébastian Japrisot, whose prose uses the poetry of the visual, has taken one wartime tragedy and turned it into a tale about morality, a novel in which a few strands of goodness...