Love & the resistance in occupied France (Charlotte Gray - Sebastian Faulks)

Member Name: indychick_uk

Product:	Charlotte Gray - Sebastian Faulks
Date:	30/10/01 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very descriptive of the period

Disadvantages: none

Doing for the 2nd World War what he did for the 1st in "Birdsong", Sebastian Faulks presents a wonderful picture of life in France during the war years.

Charlotte Gray is sent to Occupied France to run an errand for an undercover special operations unit. However she has a mission of her own - to find her lover, and airman lost in action over France.

She stays in France, against her orders, and settles in the small town of Lauverette whilst she tries to find information about her lover. Hiding her identity from the townspeople she suffers, along with them, at the hands of the occupying german army.She finds work and friendship with a cantankerous artist, Levade, whose son runs the local resistance unit.

Meanwhile her lover, Peter Gregory, injured and alone, is attempting to find a way back across the channel impeded by his tenuous grasp of the French language but aided by french people supporting the Allied effort.

As the war progresses, things in Lauverette become worse neighbours decry their neighbours to the German authorities as pressure is put on by local commanders to fill the quotas of "undesirables" being sent to concentration camps.

Charlottes employer, Levade, is packed off to a concentration camp despite having no religious beliefs himself because his grandfather had a Jewish mother. We see through his eyes the dreadful way in which Jewish people, including children, were treated in the concentration camps.

There is a link to Birdsong, we discover that Charlottes father served under Wraysford(the main character of Birdsong) during the 1st World War and his daughters experiences in France enable her at last to make peace with her father and make sense of a confusing episode from her past.

This book brings the period to life and teaches the reader about the situation in France at that time. In particular the circumstances that drove people to betray friends and neighbou
rs they had known for years, and the bravery of those who resisted the German occupation. It explores the morality of persecuting people because of religious belief or any other "difference".

But, above all this is a love story and a very powerful one, two people attempting to find each other and return home, each one only able to continue by keeping the other in mind.

If you've read Birdsong you'll love this book too, and if you haven't then read them both!

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