1914: Goodbye To All That, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw, book review: Conflict between life and art

When I interviewed Helen Dunmore earlier this year about her Great war novel, The Lie, she said: "A century isn't a long time to come to terms with a cataclysm that transformed our society. We're still getting to grips with it." The impact of the First World War is neither fixed nor remote which is why, Lavinia Greenlaw explains, this collection of essays about "the conflict between life and art" sees writers "reinvigorate questions we should never stop exploring."

The title comes from Robert Graves' 1929 work, Goodbye to All That, which marked a "bitter leave-taking of England". Conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine demonstrate that bitterness is thriving in 2014 but the theme which recurs throughout this book is silence. In "The Community of Sealed Lips", Belgian author Erwin Mortier pinpoints "gaps in the narrative universe" of his family and country. His grandmother grew up in the aftermath of the First World War then supported the Nazis, so Mortier examines a society where collaborators live alongside veterans of the resistance, with the past "hanging, unresolved..."

Mortier believes writing is a way of "making their silence audible" but not every essay succeeds. Elif Shafak's "In Search of Untold Stories" inadequately labels the First World War a "dark episode" while Jeanette Winterson's "Writing on the Wall" is a call to action rather than a catalyst for thinking. More interesting is Kamila Shamsie's "Goodbye to Some of That" which describes the imaginative burden of political upheaval and Aleš Šteger's "Tea at the Museum" which nails war as "a horrendous simplification of thought."

The wisest contributions don't try to be definitive. Xiaolu Guo investigates the fate of one of 100,000 "coolies" who were "sent from Eastern China to the ashes and mud of the European trenches." An evening with a hypnotist shows German novelist Daniel Kehlmann "what makes dictatorships possible," while NoViolet Bulawayo articulates the internal conflict that arises from writing about war-torn Zimbabwe from abroad. There's an arresting moment in "Fearing the Night," Colm Tóibín's study of World War One and the struggle for Irish independence, when we learn that, before he was killed in action, Lady Gregory's son Robert called his time in the army "the happiest of his life."

Was Robert Gregory's "happiness" bravado or symptomatic of a form of male estrangement which enables war? Mystery shrouds Ali Smith's dialogue with her dead father but "Good Voice" is gripping as Smith constructs a devastating paragraph from fragments of war poetry and "a man of mud and sadness rises like a great wave." It's the collection's opening essay but, like its subjects, you see more in this important contribution every time you revisit it.