For her third novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, Helen Simonson returns to the English seaside, this time in the summer of 1919. The Great War has ended, the flu epidemic has passed and the men have returned. But for Constance Haverhill, the war’s end has brought an end to the work she’d loved: keeping the books for an estate. Now her prospects are uncertain; her mother died of the flu, her brother is pointedly unwelcoming and she’s stuck serving as a companion to the elderly Mrs. Fog at a seaside hotel.
But soon, Constance’s lonely summer is interrupted by the trouser-wearing, motorcycle-riding Poppy Wirrall and her brother, Harris. The siblings and their mother are staying at the hotel while their grand house is renovated. During the war, Poppy and other young women delivered messages and supplies via motorcycle, and now they’re trying to build a motorcycle taxi business. Harris, a veteran who lost a leg flying bombing missions, is suffering and moody; he wants to fly again, but the world is telling him he can’t.
The story follows Constance, her new friends and a large cast of secondary characters through the summer, as they struggle to find their way in a culture that’s still shocked by women riding motorcycles, despite all the changes the war brought. Throughout, the novel weaves in issues like racism, jingoism, the repercussions of war and the limitations that class expectations put on women. Which is not to say that this is a heavy novel; the flatly villainous characters who cause trouble—several upper crust Brits and a late-arriving American—add levity to some scenes, although the novel’s tone is generally more introspective, without the comedic punch of Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Readers may wish that the novel spent more time with the Motorcycle Club women and their hopes and efforts and discontents, rather than with subplots that meander away from the motorcycles and aeroplanes of the title. Still, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment when both everything and nothing had changed, along with a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions, romantic entanglements and a bittersweet, fitting ending.
