Two English Girls and the Continent

Originally published in 1956 when he was already in his seventies, this was the second of Roché's two novels, nowadays remembered mostly because François Truffaut adapted both of them for the cinema. This one was filmed in 1971 as Les deux anglaises et le continent — no doubt doctorates have been gained over the question of why Truffaut added a definite article to the title.

The story is set in the first decade of the 20th century, and is pretty much summed up by the title. Two English sisters, Ann and Muriel, make friends with a young Frenchman, Claude, and run through various phases of love and sexual attraction, complicated by the interference of their respective mothers.

As you would expect, the novel plays around a good deal show more with the contrast between the puritanical, Anglo-Saxon approach to sexual morality and enlightened "continental" openness. Roché's position, as someone who was a contemporary of the characters he is describing, but who is writing with the hindsight of fifty years, makes this particularly interesting, but you do feel occasionally that he must be exaggerating a bit. (Muriel's "confession" about her masturbation habit being a case in point.) The period titbits are quite fun - Toynbee Hall, amateur boxing matches and so on - but there are also points where you feel that Roché isn't quite as well-informed about the English as he likes to think. Muriel is supposed to be evangelical in her religious beliefs, for instance, but this doesn't come over at all in what she says and does: she talks more like a French Roman Catholic.

The main difficulty with the structure of the novel is that it's Claude's story, but it's mainly told through the voices of Ann and Muriel, in their letters and diaries. Claude's voice is largely absent. When we do hear it, mostly in the early part of the book, it confines itself to rather dry factual accounts of events or bits of sophomoric know-allism ("I can't marry you any more because I've read Nietzsche"). He is clearly meant to be continent as well as Continent. The women, Muriel in particular, are voluble, emotionally complex, and anything but enigmatic, but they are equally clearly the products of Claude's/Roché's fevered imagination, rather than real flesh-and-blood women. Muriel becomes obsessed with Claude (in his absence) to an extent that would be embarrassing even in a Brontë novel; Ann becomes a liberated modern woman practically overnight, thanks to Claude's sexual initiation service. Truffaut quietly improved the story quite a bit by shifting the focus to Claude, and foregrounding the way that we only see the women through his eyes. He uses a number of passages lifted from the earlier novel Jules et Jim to give more substance to Claude as a character (e.g. Jules's teenage suicide attempt is transferred verbatim to Claude) and has Claude publishing a story that is obviously Jules et Jim. show less