SOURCE: “A Listener’s Guide,” in Commonweal, September 10, 1999, p. 32.

In the following review, Wheeler states that the central paradox of Fitzgerald’s Human Voices is between human truth and the lies of war.

The trouble with memory “is that it develops its own defenses, against truth telling and in consequence against history”—so writes the eighty-three-year-old Penelope Fitzgerald, an adult witness to the Battle of Britain, in reviewing a recent book on London during the Blitz. Fitzgerald faced these problems, truth telling and memory’s defenses, as a novelist in Human Voices, published almost twenty years ago in Britain and issued in the United States this spring for the first time. The novel, set in the BBC’s Broadcasting House, attempts to record the truth of human voices against the lies of war, those “consolations” by which government radio hides or distorts what is happening. In the process...