Charlotte Grey, Sebastian Faulks, Vintage, 1999
Charlotte Grey is one of Faulks’s three novels set in France against the background of the two world wars of the 20th century, the other two being Birdsong and The Girl at the Lion d’Or – it is the last in the trilogy and set largely in Vichy France, sometimes known as the free zone, the central and southern areas of France not occupied by the Germans but under the government of Petain and Laval, and in collaboration with the Germans.
It’s an historical novel and reviewers and critics point, to the meticulous research which underlies Faulks’s writing which enables him to so clearly capture places and times. Reading Charlotte Grey conjures the austerity of Vichy France, the stale wine, the sour coffee and the beetroot salads.
Faulks wrote of his motivation for writing Charlotte Grey that “I wanted to look at the insidious way that war affects individual lives.” In doing so, he explores personal, political and moral ambiguities in the community of Lavaurette in the Free Zone where Charlotte is working under cover for the resistance and where everything and everyone is normal until nothing is normal. He shows how ordinary people are affected – to betray, to fear, to be kind, to turn away, to compromise, to resist, to be courageous.
This is an immensely rich and thought-provoking novel. It is not one to read quickly; it almost requires the reader to slow down. Very little happens and much that does is opaque: a local gendarme arrests the parents of two boys; they disappear and their boys are taken into hiding and cared for and life goes on. Subsequently the boys are taken from Lavaurette to Paris and confined in a disused housing estate where they are cared for again as well as could be possible and then with many others, they board the wagon of a train bound for eastern Europe watched by commuters in a suburban Parisian station. Much may be inferred from these sequences but not all is explicit. Some found this style of Faulks’ writing frustrating in its lack of clarity, and others, that such sequences were both compelling and deeply disturbing.
But, Faulks, in writing of this period of history which is still tortuous for many French people, without sentimentality and without turning people into heroes or villains, has crafted a deeply humane story.