Human betrayal as the ground of war

Author: By Kathleen Hill

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: H2

Section: Books

Charlotte Gray
By Sebastian Faulks. Random House. 432 pp. $24.95.

Readers already familiar with Sebastian Faulks's ``Birdsong'' will find themselves in familiar territory in the pages of his new novel. ``Charlotte Gray'' also takes place in wartime France, and again the fierce logic of a love affair sets the book in motion. The blind indifference of war to the fragility of mortal flesh is measured against the lovers' moment. But this time it is the Second World War, rather than the First, that provides the setting for the story. The most striking parts of this book take place not in the towns and trenches of northern France but in the foothills of the Massif Central.

The heroine who gives the novel its name is Scottish and comes down to London in 1942 to help in the war effort. Charlotte's father had fought for the duration of the First War and had taken her as a small child to visit the British war graves in northern France. Another war is unthinkable; that had been his lesson. And yet now Charlotte has come to hate those inflicting death, has developed a kind of ``maternal identification'' with those being killed.

Her feelings for France are profound, associated with memories she can scarcely name. During a year spent in Paris as a schoolgirl, she read Proust and recognized that ``what she felt about this country was connected to a low responding note that the book had sounded in her. It had fused ideas of love and national honour to the memory of a kind of earthly paradise -- a bell ringing on the garden gate, a little phrase in a sonata -- that had been betrayed from the inside. And this betrayal was bound to happen, always -- in her own life and in the life of a country.''

If France's betrayal of itself has ended in Vichy accommodation to the Nazis, the paradise of Charlotte's early childhood has been brought to an abrupt close by an irrecoverable memory associated with her father. His anguish in the aftermath of the war has inflicted on her an obscure wound, and it is the throb of this wound that draws her in London to RAF pilot Peter Gregory. Her passion for him begins in pity, in a need to comfort, a sense that she would betray herself by resisting the intensity of such feelings. Their power for herself and for others, she later thinks, ``lay in their promise of transcendence. People followed them and believed in them because they offered not only a paradise of sensation but the promise of meaning, too; like the miracle of art, they held out an explanation of all the other faltering lights by which people were momentarily guided.''

But then Gregory, who until now has survived every hazard, disappears on a flight over France. Soon afterward Charlotte, who has been training to work for a secret organization that assists the French Resistance, enters the country under the assumed name of Dominique, an identity that allows her to remain there and try to locate Gregory. But implicit in her search for him is the attempt to mend the severed cord of her young life.

With the shift in terrain, the novel moves into a more deeply imagined zone. Whereas some of the minor characters crowding the London section seem merely to serve the contrivances of plot, there is nothing at all forgettable about the people Charlotte meets in Lavaurette, the town where she decides to remain after completing her assignment. There the encounter occurs for which Charlotte is destined.

As Dominique, she works in the household of Levade, the aging Jewish painter who has lost the power to create art because he can no longer remember his dreams. Levade, like Charlotte's father, had passed the Great War at the front, and the dreams that had driven his art rose irrepressibly from that time. To Levade -- whose son Julien is her contact in Lavaurette -- Charlotte confesses her broken memories of fatherly betrayal, her passion for Gregory. She speaks to him of disillusion, of the inevitable loss of happiness described in Proust's novel, of the lost paradise of her own childhood. ``I don't arrange my life through dreams,'' Levade tells Charlotte. ``I hope for them, I pray for them to help my painting. But I arrange my life through God.''

Betrayal in its inexhaustible variety is the subject of this novel: the infamous compromises of Marshal Petain, hero of Verdun, who a generation later becomes head of the Vichy government; the sacrifice to the authorities of one faction of the Resistance by another; the unspeakable deportation of French Jews to the death camps. The fate of the children Andre and Jacob, hidden away in an attic in Lavaurette when their parents disappear, provides some of the steadiest, saddest passages of ``Charlotte Gray.'' For this is the book's strength: its prolonged, unblinking look at human suffering, its refusal to turn away from what we can least bear to drag into the light of day.

The betrayal of what is human provides the ground of war. It also, in the compass of these pages, allows a landscape where forgiveness is sometimes possible. Levade's embracing love for his son that is blind to any offence, Charlotte's ultimate gesture of compassion toward her father, her abiding passion for Gregory: In these acts of faith life is found to be endurable. And sometimes joyful.

In its refusal to give atrocity the last word, Faulks's fiction is a courageous response, both humble and inspired, to the dire inhumanities unleashed in this century.