Charlotte Gray: A Novel

by Sebastian Faulks

Hardcover, 1999

Call number

FIC FAU

Publication

Random House (1999), Edition: 1st, 399 pages

Description

In 1942, Charlotte Gray goes to Occupied France on a duel mission, to run a simple errand for a British special operations group and to find her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. It is in the town of Lavaurette that she finds friendship and experiences life under Nazi rule. From the author of BIRDSONG.

User reviews

LibraryThing member mephit

I'd promised myself I'd never slog through a book I didn't like again, but optimism that this would get better kept me going. It didn't tho'.

SPOILERS:

Charlotte Gray herself was terribly smug and she didn't _do_ anything. She just mooned about over her fighter-pilot boyfriend. Honestly, it ought

to be impossible to create a not-much-happens (or at least it feels like nothing much happens) book out of a plot set in Nazi-ridden France, with a protagonist in disguise during the occupation, with a missing-in-action pilot to find. Quite an achievement by Faulks, you might think. Stuff did happen: two Jewish children were in hiding, messages were passed, treachery and some sex, even a killing or two. But did I care? Well, towards the end I was past caring.

The sub-plot of Charlotte's damaged relationship with her father with the looming suggestion he'd sexually abused her was a constant pall. And then you find it wasn't even that, so the whole ugliness & nausea was unnecessary and I really loathe Faulks for that. It's a desperate way to try to engender compassion for your cold stilted unlikeable character and then to sidestep it all is a nasty cheat.

His protagonist didn't protag, she didn't do anything! And for someone behind enemy lines in danger of death and torture, that's quite something. She didn't save anyone, she didn't even find her stupid, also moonsome boyfriend. Nor did she manage love-struck fidelity, she shagged some other bloke, when over-excited by parachuted goodies. She stays in France against orders, puts people in danger by using the resistance network unnecessarily and achieves sweet f-a, yet somehow excites awe and respect in people around her and gets away with disobeying her department without sanction.

Oh and that unjustifiable smugness, it was unbearable. When she went to a public baths she realised another woman had noticed her collar and cuffs didn't match. Was she a bit scared that she would be turned over to the Nazis? Did she think 'oh noz, perhaps I shouldn't have gone to a public bath or perhaps should have thought to dye my nethers?' No, no, her response was: aha, that's the first mistake g-section have made in creating my cunning disguise. And later on when she gets home she enjoys embarrassing her superior with it, relating this error as entirely theirs. What about her responsibility to protect her identity? She blabs her true name to some old geezer she's barely met and waves her pubes at the public baths, as though the word "public" didn't give a hint. Argh.

Show Less

21 more

LibraryThing member missizicks

Implausible at times, and as badly written as Birdsong. I shan't be letting any more of his books trouble my bookshelves!

LibraryThing member Lukerik

There is something very wrong with this novel. I'm not sure what's caused it. Maybe Faulks ran out of time, or couldn't be bothered, or maybe Levade Sr is a self portrait, I don't know, but it reads like a draft. It's like he's not zoned in and has just talked himself through the story. He tells

you a lot of things but never lets you see them for yourself. The problems alleviate at some points but as he's also failed to bring Charlotte into focus by that point I just couldn't have cared less.

Show Less

LibraryThing member towncalledmalice

The description of the children being deported was so sad and moving - really made an impact on me - haunting. Gives a greater understanding of the complexities of the Nazi occupation of France. A

LibraryThing member john257hopper

Most of this was good and well written, though not on a par with the great Birdsong. However, the last third or so was more dramatic and harrowing, especially the fate of M Levade and the two boys Andre and Jacob.

LibraryThing member Sashura

...what use is logic when faced with the power of truth?

I love picking bon mots in books I read. This one is from Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks, one of the best British writers.

The books I review or mention on my Tetradki blog all have certain relevance to Russia or the Russian view of the

world. Faulks is not widely known there. A Russian language internet search returned fewer than 3,000 mentions, mostly about Faulks being the new author of James Bond books.

Charlotte Gray has only fleeting references to Russia being hammered by the advancing German armies in 1942. However, the story of British intelligence trying to help - or ignite - the French Resistance to German occupation while at the same time disrupting the Communist influence within the Resistance, this story is pertinent to understanding how the fight for freedom and democracy is won - or lost. Then and now.

Much of the thinking in Charlotte Gray is devoted to why so many of the French accomodated the German occupation - and even welcomed it. Dictatorial order and clarity instead of democratic sleaze, chaos and insecurity. Many, probably most, decided they could live with a bit of indignity.

That was in France in the 40s. In Russia in the 90s, before she became what she is now, democracy had turned in to a swear word - dermocracy (shitocracy).

Show Less

LibraryThing member mearso

Found the feeling of tender, urgent romance created by Faulks immensely enjoyable. The central character doesn't dominate the book - more of an ensemble piece where you find yourself caring about many of the characters. No easy happy endings, and illuminating on the complexities of wartime France.

More complex and nuanced than the heroic resistance plot familiar in our history books.

Show Less

LibraryThing member RachelPenso

This was a wonderful book. Perhaps better than Birdsong, but that may be because I prefer the World War II era to World War I.

LibraryThing member Eyejaybee

Up to Faulks's customary high standards. The characters seem immediately plausible, and the plot is very tightly drawn.
Interesting interlacing of themes that emerged in "Birdsong", too.

LibraryThing member seekingflight

A British woman is sent as a courier into occupied France during WWII. From the movie trailer, and the blurb on the back, I had expected this to be more of an action adventure story than it actually was, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found instead. This was a nuanced and harrowing

depiction of life in occupied France, and perhaps also a coming of age of sorts for Charlotte. Charlotte herself was not the typical protagonist of an action adventure novel, and you could take quite a critical view of her actions at time, but this worked for me in terms of making her character more interesting, and in terms of contributing to her perhaps subtle but significant character development. The book packs some powerful emotional punches, describing many of the tragedies and consequences of war in vivid and haunting detail.

Show Less

LibraryThing member PIER50

Having enjoyed Birdsong i was looking forward to the second part of Sebastian Faulks French trilogy. Unfortunately, i found the first 300 pages of the book rather slow going as Charlotte Gray pottered round France moping about her lost airman. Only in the last 3rd of the book did anything much

happen. As ever, Faulks writing is excellent, but the story just did not really take off.

Show Less

LibraryThing member robertg69

tame but interesting story about resistance to Nazis in France during WWII

LibraryThing member s_mcinally

Not up to Birdsong, and in the main fairly pedestrian, however, some parts were excellent and for them it is well worth reading. His description of the jewish children getting taken to the camps will be with me forever. The old father's story is also very good. I If I could mark it only on the good

bits then it would be a 4 but the pedestrian parts brought it down to the 3

Show Less

LibraryThing member PennyAnne

Nowhere near as good as Birdsong but interesting although Charlotte herself seems like a bit of a nutter!

LibraryThing member Miguelnunonave

I love Faulks. His books are warm, pleasurable and extremely well written. Neither shallow nor too profound. This one goes on about yet another heroic tale during WWII, a somewhat tiresome theme you would say. But it does so in such an engaging, fast-paced manner that it really makes reading a true

pleasure. Also, a moving book, one that doesn't leave you indifferent.

Show Less

LibraryThing member kr04bps

More than the romance and the plot, I enjoyed the description of the everyday life of a small French town in so-called Free France. Faulks makes clear the ease with which people made peace with the deportation of their neighbors, the cruelty that neighbors could inflict on each other in the name of

collaboration, the possibility of great evil created by great men and by small men with a taste of power.
Page 154: A kind gendarme ordered to arrest French Jews, does so to obey the law and get home to his own family. ". . . an instant of clear and shocking revelation: a chain of compromise and inertia, at no single point perceptible as choice in moral colours, had had in the end a cumulative effect. The complicity of an honest man, thinking that he wanted to be back with his family for dinner, had closed an evil circle....for him the revelation was provided by the look of blameless guilt in a gendarme's eyes." The Parisians on their way to work hurry past the buses taking Jewish children to the trains that will transport them to Poland. Their daily lives go on while the horror is right in front of them.
page 166: "In times of war you sometimes had to be expedient. Even as he explained this to himself he realised that this was exactly the argument employed by Petain and Laval. The difference was that his position was not merely expedient, it had moral backing. ...So he hoped."
page 215: "If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand--and you say, No, maybe not, it's just a bore to my friends. What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die?"
Page 370: The description of the two little boys: "Jacob took Andre's hand and found that there was already something in it--a tin soldier. Andre kissed Jacob's shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips. There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared."
and Charlotte and Peter at the end of the book as they walk into a church for the wedding of their friends: "...Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory's and found that it already contained something--the handle of his stick. She held on to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared."

Show Less

LibraryThing member SeriousGrace

Charlotte Gray is a independent Scottish woman determined to make a difference in the effort to liberate France during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Starting out as a receptionist for a doctor in London, she quickly realizes she is meant for bigger and better things after she meets RAF pilot

Peter Gregory. Falling hopelessly in love with him after a short yet passionate affair, she is determined to find him after his plane goes down behind enemy lines. Dyeing her hair and assuming a new identity is only the beginning for Charlotte, especially after she assumes the role of live-in housemaid to an ailing and eccentric Jewish artist. Throughout Charlotte's search for Peter she is faced with many harsh realities about war and her own past. The big mystery is whether or not she will find peace or Peter or both.

Show Less

LibraryThing member pennsylady

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"

LibraryThing member CindaMac

I love Sebastian Faulks and I loved this book set in France and Britain during WWII. Intrigue, espionage, romance... need I say more? I liked it even better than Birdsong because the latter was too sad - and very real.

LibraryThing member hardlyhardy

"For the first time he believed that his own life, however tarnished in his eyes, was what was necessary for the redemption of hers." - Sebastian Faulks, "Charlotte Gray"

That line near the end of "Charlotte Gray" (1998) helped bring into focus a Sebastian Faulks novel that had been a bit fuzzy to

me from the beginning. Having seen the movie based on the novel I had expected a World War II thriller, as well as a different kind of love story. The novel does have its tense moments, but they don't last long and they always seem secondary. But what are they secondary to? So much of the story seems too much like real life with its apparently directionless plot.

Charlotte Gray is an attractive young woman from Scotland who goes to London in 1942 to help with the war effort. She is the daughter of an officer in "Birdsong," the bestselling World War I novel that was the second book in the Faulks trilogy that also includes "The Girl at the Lion d'Or." Because she speaks French so well, she is sent to France for what is supposed to be a short mission.

But her lover, an airman named Peter Gregory, has been shot down somewhere in France, and Charlotte decides to stay and try to find him. Meanwhile she becomes involved with a Frenchman who falls in love with her though he doesn't even know her real name and also in the plight of two Jewish boys whose mother has already been taken to a camp in Poland. In the end she can rescue neither Peter nor the boys, though she herself is saved and manages to return to England, as does Peter Gregory with the help of others.

So redemption seems to be what Faulks is writing about. Sometimes we can succeed in saving others. Often we can't. Still we must try. Reunited with Charlotte, Peter realizes his role in her redemption (those are his thoughts in the above quote). And then Charlotte helps her own father find redemption. Father and daughter have been estranged since her girlhood for reasons neither is clear about. Still traumatized by his war experiences, he had said something or did something to his young daughter that, while short of sexual abuse, had much the same impact. Charlotte returns home to see her mother, but it is her father whom she helps bring home to her.

Show Less

LibraryThing member whirled

For years I've been thinking of myself as a Sebastian Faulks fan - reading this book made me realise, finally, that I am merely someone who enjoyed Birdsong. This is the third time I've finished one of his books feeling frustrated, befuddled and bored.

All the ingredients are there - young Scottish

lass heads to London during World War II, finds romance and independence, dabbles in espionage while she's at it - what's not to like? And yet Charlotte Gray is somehow tepid and lacking in dramatic tension. For me, the main issue was that Charlotte Gray flitted from scene to scene, seemingly achieving very little in her 'work' for the French Resistance. In this and in her romance with airman Peter Gregory, there is little sense of Charlotte having something at stake.

I have two more Sebastian Faulks books on my shelf, but they are being moved to the bottom of my towering 'to be read' pile. Disappointing.

Show Less

LibraryThing member NaggedMan

I loved it.

Fewer