Review:- Sebastian FAULKS – “Charlotte Gray”

Publ: 2006
My own copy
ISBN: 0 09 939431 6
Genre: World War II
Pages: 496p
Continuing to read books by this author
Rating: ***** ****


What led you to pick up this book?
I was thoroughly enthralled by Birdsong and The Girl at the Lion D’Or and this is the third of Faulks’ French novels.

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A Scottish girl travels south to help with the war effort and in so doing meets and falls in love with an airman. She is trained as a courier and when his plane is downed on the continent she goes in search of him.

What did you think of the characters?
Excellent.

What did you think about the style?
Very readable and everything seemed so true to life one could imagine oneself in wartime England and France. The conflicting emotions and politics that being in France evoked in its residents whilst under Occupation are very well drawn.

What did you like most about the book?
An excellent combination of action, romance, history and characterisation.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
Average.

Would I recommend it?
Yes.

Quotations:
“I’ve got to have conversation lessons from some old dame...”
Borowski was laughing. “It doesn’t sound like you at all, Greg. Who is this French mistress?”
“French mistress, Borowski. In English we say French mistress. A French mistress is something else.”

Other people’s dreams, Charlotte remembered her father telling her as a teenager, are the most tedious conversational topic on earth.

I will wait until the war is over. Thins will be forgotten if we win. In fact, history is already being rewritten.

When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory isd the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old [persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

Sebastian FAULKS see The Girl at the Lion D’Or.

Review: Sebastian FAULKS - "The Girl at the Lion D'Or"

Publ: 1990
My own copy
ISBN: 0 09 977490 9
Genre: General Fiction
Pages: 250p
Found by Serendipity but also continuing reading the author's works
Rating: ***** *****


What led you to pick up this book?
I saw the title and cover in a charity shop and both instantly appealed. A moment later I realised the author was Sebastian Faulks whose Birdsong is one of my top 150 fiction books.

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A girl with a mysterious background arrives to start work at a seedy provincial hotel in 1930s France. A Parisian lawyer moves to the countryside. Girl meets boy....

What did you think of the characters?
As well developed and as sympathetic as any to be found in the great classics of literature. They are as real as one's own family but with the difference that Faulks has helped us to understand them in a way that we never understand our own relations.

What did you think about the style?
Classic. One feels that Faulks could set his hand to any plot and make the whole landscape of it live. Emotions are explored in a way that only the very best of authors can do.

What did you like most about the book?
Probably the characterisation but the whole book is first class. It is the sort of book you want all your friends to have read.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
Simple answer - No.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
An unattributed picture which I would happily have hanging on my wall.

Would I recommend it?
Absolutely.

Quotations:
In a moment Anne could see in his large hands and the strength of his movements all the other ages of his life, as if his body were a palimpsest on which had successively been subscribed the stories of his childhood, adolescence and youth, none of them entirely effacing its forerunner, so that suddenly the contradictions of his bigness and delicacy became understandable and she found herself seeing through his manly self-possession to the ghost of his vulnerable boyhood.

She was wearing her waitress's black dress and her waitress's smile through which, Hartmann thought as he watched, little bubbles of the private girl kept breaking.

When next you pass the memorial in the Place de la Victoire, stop and look at the list of names. Try to imagine that they're not just letters chipped into rock but that each one has a face, a laugh, a look. My life might just as well have ended with them, too. But yours is possible because of them.

It was a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony; it was impossible to imagine that he hedgerows and the fields and the woods and streams and isolated cottages were in any other than their appointed place. Only she, a human, with her illusion of free will, couldn't find her true position in it all.


SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b1953) worked as a journalist for 14 years before taking up writing books full time in 1991. He is the author of A Trick of Light, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, A Fool's Alphabet, the celebrated Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He lives with his wife and two children in London.