Rene J. Defourneaux, Major US Army (Ret.) Author of The Winking Fox, and of The Tracks of the Fox.
Charlotte Gray is a young Scottish woman who sets off to do her bit by working in a London surgery. On the train, she encounters English golfers Cannerley and Morris. Cannerley seems a bit smitten by Charlotte and decides to chat to her, even giving her his phone number. Events are set in motion when Charlotte reveals that she's fluent in French, and it becomes obvious that Cannerley and Morris are involved in work of a somewhat secretive nature. When Charlotte is out socialising at a literary party in London, she meets RAF pilot Peter Gregory. Unbeknownst to each other, they fall in love. For Charlotte, this isn't a source of great happiness, and Gregory is a little unsure of himself too. Charlotte just knows that she has an inconsolable yearning for Gregory. He is assigned to RAF duties in France, and so needs to brush up on his appalling French. Unfortunately, he does not really take this opportunity to get even closer to Charlotte. Instead, he takes to learning French from the books of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Faulks is using the benefit of hindsight here, as most readers will know that Saint-Exupery was a French pilot who later died in a crash. The literary party at which Charlotte and Gregory meet is likened to an illustration of Dante's Inferno by Gustav Dore (you know - big demons with wings kind of thing). The otherwise vacuous Daisy is a bit of a poetry reader, and compares Charlotte with a "woman wailing" for her "demon lover" from Coleridge's Kubla Khan. It seems that Gregory is doomed.
Sure enough, Gregory doesn't make his way back from France. Charlotte immediately assumes that he's been killed, but his commanders presume he's missing in action, until they hear otherwise. Too many late nights and parties ensures that Charlotte loses her job, but anyway, she has been planning to resign and takes up Cannerley's offer to join the FANY. From there she's drafted into SOE's Section G (in real life, this was Section F). Major Selwyn Jepson seems to have been Faulks' model for the character of Jackson. Charlotte herself is possibly based on Violette Szabo, the most famous FANY recruit, whose story was turned into the film "Carve her Name with Pride". I'm thinking here mainly of Charlotte's romantic motivations to go to France, in a naive bid to try to find Gregory and bring him back. Szabo was involved in the later liberation of France, and ran against the norm of the FANY by not being upper class. Charlotte is sent to France because of her linguistic abilities rather than her fighting skills, and her personal mission seems as deluded as that of the detective in Ishiguro's 'When we were Orphans'.
Charlotte learned French when visiting France with her family, with the wounded father who has so mysteriously injured her. The world she saw through the words of Proust has inevitably changed. The occupying German forces have made their mark, most noticeably in a changing of attitudes. There are some of those in Lavaurette who are for the Vichy regime, and some of those who are against. Charlotte is attached to a small resistance cell headed by an architect called Julien in the so-called Free Zone. To her surprise, Charlotte finds that there is not a great deal of support for the British, and it's just as well that SOE has gone to some lengths to disguise her. But there are those who suspect her secret... Charlotte, when she refuses to return to Blightly, lives in the household of Julien's father, the artist Levade. Whilst Charlotte and Julien retrieve parachutes, SOE decides to brutally exploit Charlotte's love for Gregory. Julien has two little secrets to hide himself as Vichy collaborates with the Nazis a little too far. Into the village come the Germans and the Milice, the French SS. Soon there will be departures to Drancy, last stop before Auschwitz.
Faulks' historical accuracy is conveyed by the direct quotation of the disgusting Milice oath. He makes his fiction distinctive by looking at life behind the Vichy regime and in the French concentration camps, and explores the concept of what it was like to have the French policed by the French. Meanwhile the Nazis steal everything from the Jews, even Yiddish proverbs like "As happy as God in France". Faulks reveals the kinds of truths that France itself has only started admitting in the nineties (and this is maybe what the subplot with Charlotte's father is all about). As Faulks writes, Pichon is a fictional character, but there were Pichons out there. Inevitably in this kind of book though, Charlotte and Julien become ciphers towards the end as Faulks bids to include all the horrors, but they work for SOE, so they're used to poetic ciphers. Most compelling of all is Faulks' use of hindsight - we know what's going to happen to Andre and Jacob, even if Charlotte proclaims that she does not.
