IN 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France
on a dual mission: to run an apparantly simple errand for a British
special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman
called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action. In the small town
of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its
agony in 'the black years', here is the full range of collaboration,
from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary
courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien,
Charlotte meets his father a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed
him. In Charlotte's friendship with both men, Faulks opens up the theme
of false memory and of paradises--both national and personal--that
appear irredeemably lost. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in
which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is
delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love.
In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and
its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte
Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.
