Sean O’Brien
CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson)
With Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks completes a trilogy begun with the slim inter-war romance The Girl at the Lion d’Or and substantiated by the large and massively popular Great War novel Birdsong. The new novel takes us to World War II, to Vichy France, the various fractious resistance groupings and the machinations of the British intelligence services. Thus there is a slightly more explicit political dimension here than in the earlier books, but like its predecessors Charlotte Gray is also a love story.
As readers familiar with Faulks’s work will know, he construes love as a form of heroism: so, here, the ostensibly prim young Scotswoman Charlotte is parachuted into France, where as well as performing her duties she searches for her missing lover, an English pilot.
Love, the suggestion goes, must be stronger than likely death, even as Charlotte’s mind’s-eye picture of the young man fades and another passion offers itself. Her travels as a courier bring her into increasingly intimate contact with a resistance leader . Virtue, it seems, will have to make do with compromise.
The greatest strength of Faulks’s writing lies in description and evocation. His real and imagined French towns exert a dank, melancholy fascination. Their secrecy, tedium and inarticulate frustration seem almost paradisally complete. We know what people eat and what they smell like; their blend of indifference and despair; the closeness to the surface of their anti-Semitism; and we sense the swallowed misery of the millions of war-bereaved.
Yet Charlotte seems unreal, and the sense of inauthenticity extends to other characters, too. The men from intelligence are ciphers for realpolitik, while Charlotte’s flatmates come shrieking in from Costume Drama, and in their presence the novel crosses over into genre fiction without the book acquiring the thriller writer’s virtues of pace and tension.
It is hard to account for the sense of aesthetic dissonance created by the novel as a whole: on the one hand, seriousness, the gradually awakening horror at the Holocaust; on the other, something close to kitsch – an English period piece with everything in place except the life for which Faulks has so carefully set the scene. Faced with the scale of his ambitions, Faulks, one senses, may have hesitated – as his heroine would not.