Charlotte Gray

I wanted another war romance. I got one. Reading Sebastian Faulks I feel my vocabulary rising. lugubrious. Yeah I've seen that before, but what does it mean? and so it goes.

This will be one of my favorite reads for the year and encourages me to tackle and finish Birdsong. I like Faulks writing. Except. There are two things here, well, at least two things, but these two bugged me. There are some eyerolling sex scenes near the beginning of the novel which unsurprising to me earned this book an award "Bad Sex in Fiction Award (Winner – 1998)". I didn't think they were real bad, just uncomfortable. The other bigger bother comes at the end (following earlier glimpses) and I won't try to describe it but it is supposed to reveal to the show more reader as well as Charlotte Gray why she gets depression and why she feels there is something vacant or something in her childhood - like she missed it. Whatever it was it didn't work for me and I just think there had to be a better way to convey what happened. Overall, tho, this is a great book about WWII and the romance of two souls who had a love at first sight and then we see inside France during the resistance. This is a story about trying to save yourself and others, and not always managing it, but getting through it. Quite a few characters, some not well drawn enough for me, but most done quite well.

There was a movie done shortly after the book which somehow I never saw.

I should probably talk more about some of the content in the book. The book is broken into 4 distinct parts. Part One introduces us to Charlotte Gray who is a Scottish woman in wartime England. I don't recall if a date was given but this is perhaps early 1942 and she comes to London to work. A chance encounter on the train going there results in a contact who later introduces her to government agents who train people to be put into Vichy France to help drive the resistance against the Germans. Charlotte is a good catch for them since she is a good French speaker, having spent a year or so in France when she was younger. But stepping back a moment shortly after Charlotte arrives in London she meets an RAF pilot at a social gathering and the two of them are intensely drawn to each other. The pilot, Peter Gregory, is a survivor of the Battle of Britain and he has lost almost all of his fellow pilot friends. Both Charlotte and Peter have internal voids of some sort from their experiences which somehow is part of the magnetism they feel for each other. Peter has started flying clandestine nighttime missions over France. He has come to think of himself as invincible as a pilot. Well, he doesn't come back and Charlotte eventually finds out a few bits and this propels her to be very serious about her training. The story becomes rather emotional for the reader because we have come to care about these two people. At the end of Part One with her training nearly done we are with Charlotte looking at her future. "She closed her eyes and felt her lips come inward in a narrow line. She saw his face. Don't worry, my love, don't worry. I'm coming to get you."

Part Two starts in the summer of '42 in occupied France in a village called Lavaurette. It is a real place, and the population of men there and in much of France was decimated by World War I, the Great War. Petain has assumed power in Vichy France and we are almost immediately introduced to the anti-jewish sentiment of many French people. We follow a young boy on some errands for his mother and when he returns home later his family is disappeared, the house locked and a yellow star from fresh paint is on the door. I think I'll stop here. We do soon reconnect with Charlotte in England who is preparing still and is soon sent to France. And not surprisingly, after a time Charlotte arrives in Lavaurette, in disguise with a new name, and connects with the people at the beginning of the second part.

All of this felt very real in my mind which I consider a testament to the author's skill. show less

More than the romance and the plot, I enjoyed the description of the everyday life of a small French town in so-called Free France. Faulks makes clear the ease with which people made peace with the deportation of their neighbors, the cruelty that neighbors could inflict on each other in the name of collaboration, the possibility of great evil created by great men and by small men with a taste of power.
Page 154: A kind gendarme ordered to arrest French Jews, does so to obey the law and get home to his own family. ". . . an instant of clear and shocking revelation: a chain of compromise and inertia, at no single point perceptible as choice in moral colours, had had in the end a cumulative effect. The complicity of an honest man, thinking show more that he wanted to be back with his family for dinner, had closed an evil circle....for him the revelation was provided by the look of blameless guilt in a gendarme's eyes." The Parisians on their way to work hurry past the buses taking Jewish children to the trains that will transport them to Poland. Their daily lives go on while the horror is right in front of them.
page 166: "In times of war you sometimes had to be expedient. Even as he explained this to himself he realised that this was exactly the argument employed by Petain and Laval. The difference was that his position was not merely expedient, it had moral backing. ...So he hoped."
page 215: "If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand--and you say, No, maybe not, it's just a bore to my friends. What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die?"
Page 370: The description of the two little boys: "Jacob took Andre's hand and found that there was already something in it--a tin soldier. Andre kissed Jacob's shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips. There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared."
and Charlotte and Peter at the end of the book as they walk into a church for the wedding of their friends: "...Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory's and found that it already contained something--the handle of his stick. She held on to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared." show less

I'd promised myself I'd never slog through a book I didn't like again, but optimism that this would get better kept me going. It didn't tho'.

SPOILERS:

Charlotte Gray herself was terribly smug and she didn't _do_ anything. She just mooned about over her fighter-pilot boyfriend. Honestly, it ought to be impossible to create a not-much-happens (or at least it feels like nothing much happens) book out of a plot set in Nazi-ridden France, with a protagonist in disguise during the occupation, with a missing-in-action pilot to find. Quite an achievement by Faulks, you might think. Stuff did happen: two Jewish children were in hiding, messages were passed, treachery and some sex, even a killing or two. But did I care? Well, towards the end I show more was past caring.

The sub-plot of Charlotte's damaged relationship with her father with the looming suggestion he'd sexually abused her was a constant pall. And then you find it wasn't even that, so the whole ugliness & nausea was unnecessary and I really loathe Faulks for that. It's a desperate way to try to engender compassion for your cold stilted unlikeable character and then to sidestep it all is a nasty cheat.

His protagonist didn't protag, she didn't do anything! And for someone behind enemy lines in danger of death and torture, that's quite something. She didn't save anyone, she didn't even find her stupid, also moonsome boyfriend. Nor did she manage love-struck fidelity, she shagged some other bloke, when over-excited by parachuted goodies. She stays in France against orders, puts people in danger by using the resistance network unnecessarily and achieves sweet f-a, yet somehow excites awe and respect in people around her and gets away with disobeying her department without sanction.

Oh and that unjustifiable smugness, it was unbearable. When she went to a public baths she realised another woman had noticed her collar and cuffs didn't match. Was she a bit scared that she would be turned over to the Nazis? Did she think 'oh noz, perhaps I shouldn't have gone to a public bath or perhaps should have thought to dye my nethers?' No, no, her response was: aha, that's the first mistake g-section have made in creating my cunning disguise. And later on when she gets home she enjoys embarrassing her superior with it, relating this error as entirely theirs. What about her responsibility to protect her identity? She blabs her true name to some old geezer she's barely met and waves her pubes at the public baths, as though the word "public" didn't give a hint. Argh. show less

I love Faulks. His books are warm, pleasurable and extremely well written. Neither shallow nor too profound. This one goes on about yet another heroic tale during WWII, a somewhat tiresome theme you would say. But it does so in such an engaging, fast-paced manner that it really makes reading a true pleasure. Also, a moving book, one that doesn't leave you indifferent.

"For the first time he believed that his own life, however tarnished in his eyes, was what was necessary for the redemption of hers." - Sebastian Faulks, "Charlotte Gray"

That line near the end of "Charlotte Gray" (1998) helped bring into focus a Sebastian Faulks novel that had been a bit fuzzy to me from the beginning. Having seen the movie based on the novel I had expected a World War II thriller, as well as a different kind of love story. The novel does have its tense moments, but they don't last long and they always seem secondary. But what are they secondary to? So much of the story seems too much like real life with its apparently directionless plot.

Charlotte Gray is an attractive young woman from Scotland who goes to London in show more 1942 to help with the war effort. She is the daughter of an officer in "Birdsong," the bestselling World War I novel that was the second book in the Faulks trilogy that also includes "The Girl at the Lion d'Or." Because she speaks French so well, she is sent to France for what is supposed to be a short mission.

But her lover, an airman named Peter Gregory, has been shot down somewhere in France, and Charlotte decides to stay and try to find him. Meanwhile she becomes involved with a Frenchman who falls in love with her though he doesn't even know her real name and also in the plight of two Jewish boys whose mother has already been taken to a camp in Poland. In the end she can rescue neither Peter nor the boys, though she herself is saved and manages to return to England, as does Peter Gregory with the help of others.

So redemption seems to be what Faulks is writing about. Sometimes we can succeed in saving others. Often we can't. Still we must try. Reunited with Charlotte, Peter realizes his role in her redemption (those are his thoughts in the above quote). And then Charlotte helps her own father find redemption. Father and daughter have been estranged since her girlhood for reasons neither is clear about. Still traumatized by his war experiences, he had said something or did something to his young daughter that, while short of sexual abuse, had much the same impact. Charlotte returns home to see her mother, but it is her father whom she helps bring home to her. show less

I have put off reading this book for far too long. However, it was worth the wait. I have decided that Faulk's early books are far superior to his more recent fare.
Charlotte Gray leaves her home in Scotland, in 1942, as she wishes to contribute to the war effort. She has a position as a Doctor's receptionist but finds it far from satisfying and she isn't particularly good at it. A chance encounter on her train trip to London, provides her with a contact, which allows her to embark on a new career. She had mentioned she is fluent in French, a skill highly regarded in these times. She is recruited as a courier, accompanying those in the secret service with limited French on their missions in France. During her time in London she meets and show more falls in love with an English pilot Peter Gregory. When Peter is listed as missing, she decides to stay on in France to try and find him. She offers her assistance to various resistance groups and becomes embroiled in the local village affairs.
What really surprised me was how divided France was, the collaboration with the Germans and the level of animosity towards the Jewish community by so many. Once again the shocking ignorance of what was happening to the Jewish community is depicted in all its brutality.
I found this a very satisfying read. show less

A British woman is sent as a courier into occupied France during WWII. From the movie trailer, and the blurb on the back, I had expected this to be more of an action adventure story than it actually was, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found instead. This was a nuanced and harrowing depiction of life in occupied France, and perhaps also a coming of age of sorts for Charlotte. Charlotte herself was not the typical protagonist of an action adventure novel, and you could take quite a critical view of her actions at time, but this worked for me in terms of making her character more interesting, and in terms of contributing to her perhaps subtle but significant character development. The book packs some powerful emotional punches, show more describing many of the tragedies and consequences of war in vivid and haunting detail. show less