In Oregon, USA, in 1995 an old lady, terminally ill, is found scrabbling in her attic by her son. She has an open trunk of memorabilia among which is a French identity card from the Second World War in the name of Juliette Gervaise. Her son asks, who is she?
Rewind to France, 1939, in Carriveau, somewhere in the Loire Valley, where Vianne Mauriac lives. After a difficult adolescence – her mother died when Vianne was 14, her father returned from the First World War an emotional wreck, and her ten-years-younger sister, Isabelle, is a tearaway – she has found happiness with husband Antoine and eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. Of course it cannot last much longer, it is 1939 and Antoine is called up to defend France from the Nazis.
As for Isabelle, now a teenager, she has just been expelled from her latest school and is determined to live in Paris with her father. No chance. As ever, he rejects her and packs her off to her sister in Carriveau.
So much for the set-up; Vianne (26), Isabelle (16), and Sophie (8) become the household at Carriveau at the start of the war. What follows - invasion, occupation, rationing, privation, persecution of Jews and other undesirables, billeting of German officers, resistance, reprisals, death, destruction, bravery, betrayal, torture, executions, and eventually liberation – forms the guts of the next 400 pages.
Told mainly from the point of view of the two sisters, it provides a rare female perspective on the wartime experience. And as the sisters have polar opposite personalities, it highlights the dilemma for the occupied population – grudgingly collaborate and survive, or resist at the risk death, and not merely your own.
The prose flows well enough and the narrative never stalls, but somehow I never felt immersed, it was always a story I was reading rather than living. Maybe a female reader would empathise more with the sisters’ plight.
Nevertheless, a book
worth the reading.
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