The Metal Heart
Caroline Lea’s recent historical fiction, The Metal Heart: A Novel of WWII (2021) fictionalizes events on the northern Scottish islands of Orkney during the 1940s. Twin sisters, Dorothy and Constance, flea to a remote island said to be cursed after the death of their parents. Facing the brutal elements as winter descends, the sisters find their isolation invaded by a population of prisoners of war who are relocated by the British Army to Orkney in order to labor on a protective earthen barrier around the islands. The sisters and the Italian prisoners connect as Dorothy and Constance take up work as nurses at the camp even while most of the Orkney natives fear the presence of these enemy soldiers; together they find hope and love in an unlikely setting.
Told in alternating perspectives, The Metal Heart interweaves the stories and inner lives of the Scottish sisters and Italian prisoners of war to create a montage of internal experience set amidst the harsh Orkney winter. As the novel progresses, one sister leans into romance while the other battles her mysterious trauma and attempts to heal. The Metal Heart includes plenty of hard themes—war, grief, and sexual violence to name a few—but it treats them in ways that emphasize the resilience of the human spirit. The novel’s conclusion winds all the storylines together leaving its reader breathless as she puts the pieces together. And while this story involves plenty of tragedy, it also ends in hope.
Like many historical fiction authors, Lea builds upon real events in her novel. The Metal Heart centers upon the real construction of the Italian Chapel in Orkney by prisoners of war during the Second World War. Even the titular metal heart is a real object affiliated with the Italian Chapel. Of course, the characters and their lives are fiction, but I thoroughly enjoyed the ways in which The Metal Heart teaches a version of that history that champions the courage and humanity of people regardless of nationality. Humans, this novel reminds us, connect with one another in unexpected ways even in the hardest of circumstances. For readers who appreciate novels that transport them in time and place, particularly for fans of WWII historical fiction, The Metal Heart will provide an entertaining and moving read. It gifts readers with a fictionalized snapshot of Orkney’s home front during WWII and the everyday struggles, fears, and loves of its residents. This novel, as one no doubt expects from WWII fiction, includes plenty of resilience, but also plenty of tragedy. Its final scene left me rereading its final pages as I sat with the heaviness and the beauty of Lea’s story.
Bibliography:
Lea, Caroline. The Metal Heart: A Novel of WWII. Harper Perennial: 2021.
