Saying goodbye to Proust
Anita Brookner
CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson, f16.99, pp. 393 Charlotte Gray is a young Scottish girl who comes to wartime London to work as a receptionist to a doctor in Harley Street. On the train from Edinburgh (trains figure largely in this novel) she meets two men who tell her to get in touch if she desires more interesting work. On the basis of this very slight acquaintance they recruit her to G section, an undercover agency which arranges for couriers to be dropped into Unoccupied France, along with ammuni- tion and supplies. To this end they are fur- nished with aliases or code names, and given rudimentary training.
Meanwhile Charlotte has fallen in love with a pilot, Peter Gregory, whom she has met at a party. He is described as 'dam- aged', and indeed does not play a heroic part in the narrative. But Charlotte has enough strength and courage for both of them: she is clearly no mean heroine, either as Charlotte, as Daniele, or as Dominique, and her decision to remain in France, once she knows that her lover has come down somewhere in that vast coun- try, receives no reprimand from her superi- ors, elicits no anxiety from her parents or surprise from her friends, and arouses very little mistrust in the inhabitants of Lavau- rette, a very small town with an important railway junction. Trains go to Limoges, to Clermont-Ferrand, to Chateaudun, and eventually to Paris. In Paris the Metro takes her to Le Bourget-Drancy, where for the first time she, and we, find out what the war is all about.
In this romantic, discursive, and some- times bewildering account an important point is made: the war in France was less a war between the French and the Germans than a civil war, between the Milice and the undesirables, those who, when not actually Jewish, which would rule them out of the coming victory altogether, did not believe in the Hero of Verdun and his assurance that a greater France would soon sit with a greater Germany at Europe's top table. The English contribution to the resistance of such Frenchmen who retained a vestigial grasp of French honour was relatively frivolous: telephone messages to hair- dressers and garage owners with exotic coy- ers, supplies of food and weapons occasion- ally dropped by parachute, cryptic mes- sages passed through unreliable networks. In comparison with their French counter- parts, those very few heroes, the English contributed the sort of innocence com- pounded of ignorance and good will. Char- lotte herself, now Dominique, excites little curiosity when working as a servant for a disillusioned elderly Jewish painter. Nei- ther of them perceives any danger in this arrangement. The painter, Levade, is both saddened by the loss of his once consider- able gift and uplifted by his faith in God. Jewish scepticism has so deserted him that he has neither a gun nor a suitcase packed for the inevitable journey.
Beneath the fictitious events there is a reality which is partly unacknowledged. Thus the characters do not know, have not heard of what will become of Milice, though they do trust its architect, Laval, largely on account of his appearance. The Milice demands only a love of order, loyal- ty to Main, and hatred of Jews and com- munists. The Milice will recruit principally among malcontents, hooligans, and known trouble-makers who might otherwise be deported to Germany as part of Laval's eight-for-one exchange system for prisoners taken in the brief fight of May 1940, before capitulation. The law of 2 June 1941 gave the right of internment to the local prefec- ture of any Jews, foreign or French. Collab- oration with the occupier was intended to safeguard the independence of a racially pure France. The names to remember in this context are those of Vallat, Darquier de Pellepoix, and Bousquet. Darquier de Pellepoix in particular believed that the Jewish crime was genetic and therefore ineradicable. In that sense, assimilated or invisible Jews were the most dangerous.
Charlotte, before she became Dominique, thought of France as the country of Proust, of dinners in the rue de Tournon, of the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens, of a particularly harmonious way of life. She is not much affected by what she witnesses, even from the upper room of a café in Drancy. Helping hands have assisted her throughout her muddled and confusing itinerary. There has even been a lover along the way, an architect called Julien Levade, son of the unrealistic Jewish painter, whose activities are enthusiastic but again not quite clear. It is obviously a mistake to impose hindsight on a narrative which copes heroically with ambiguous contemporary events, although it has to be said that Faulks imposes a kind of opti- mism on even the most fallible of enterpris- es, an optimism which he seems to share with the young pilots who occupy his first chapter, and whose light-heartedness has turned them into figures of legend.
Not that this is a light-hearted novel: far from it. But it is not quite completely resolved. It is a love story, with a happy ending, and these events would have read more convincingly if they had been recounted from another viewpoint, as in Piers Paul Read's fine novel, The Free Frenchman, or Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, in which it is possible to forget that one is reading fiction. Here one is never free of that knowledge, and the conscien- tious style, uncomplicated, matter-of-fact, adds little in the way of tension. Sebastian Faulks has won great and deserved praise for his earlier novels about France, The Girl at the Lion d'Or and Birdsong. His desire to bring his chronicles up to date is no less heroic. Perhaps he will now trace the lives of those latter-day resistants who proclaimed their valour once they knew that the Allies would be victorious. This would be both more instructive and more demanding. No place for English insou- ciance there.
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