Carroll's novel explores the idea that Anne Cécile Desclos (1907 – 1998), a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage, wrote The Story of O as an unconscious metaphor for the most shameful episode in modern French history: the Nazi Occupation of France in the Second World War. That is, O's surrender to degradation is a metaphor for the French surrender in June 1940 and the ensuing partition of France into the Occupied territory in the north and west; and in central and southern France, the pro-Nazi collaborationist state of Vichy under Marshal Philippe Pétain. In his Notes on a Novel at the end of the book, Carroll writes:

If Story of O had been written in the 1970s and later it wouldn't have mattered. But the fact is that Dominique Aury wrote it as a love letter to her lover, publisher Jean Paulham, soon after, in the rain-shadow of the Occuption, when words such as 'surrender', 'submission', 'defeat' and 'liberation' had a meaning redolent of an all too recent, shameful past. Everybody was on edge, nerves were jangled, the experience still raw, and to a large extent the populace wanted to put the Occupation behind them. Repress it.

But the moods and preoccupations of a country, especially at certain pivotal moments, have a way of surfacing through art. Whether consciously, unconsciously, or a combination of both, art can sometimes mirror the very thing that a country wants to forget. And it increasingly occurred to me that, as unlikely a candidate as it may seem, Story of O was just such a work: one of those cases in which the individual psyche is like the whole society writ large. (p.301)

While Carroll's O isn't biographical fiction, some of the characters and events are based on real life. The novel begins with Dominique Aury's fury and disgust about the Surrender, and her meeting with her soon-to-be lover, the publisher at Gallimard, Jean Paulham. Amongst other things, we learn that he is also involved in Les Éditions de Minuit the real-life clandestine publisher of books to counter German censorship. The most famous of these books, Le Silence de la Mer (which I reviewed here) isn't mentioned, but the underground materials that Dominique delivers at Jean's instigation would have included it. But as Carroll explains, the real-life Dominique Aury never did anything as dangerous as the rescue of Pauline Réage, who is an authorial invention.

The Dominique of the novel writes her novel to rekindle the flame of her affair with Jean, who is starting to look at other women, the way he first looked at her. She also wants to prove to him that women can write sexual fantasies just as men can, just as the Marquise de Sade did. Her work isn't intended for publication, but Jean persuades her, and though Gallimard dismisses it as pornographic smut, they find an alternative publisher. It causes a scandal, and it divides its readers.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/26/o-by-steven-carroll/ ( )