Book review
I finished the book The Collaborators today, and I was, in the end, disappointed. The blurb talked about how it was a story of the balance between large and small causes, your country and your family, how far you can or should go to save others.
Spoilers! I don’t particularly recommend the book, but fair warning.
The story is about a Catholic woman married to a Jewish man in occupied France, and her relationship with a German officer during this period. It starts with her on trial for being a collaborator, and pleading guilty, then goes back to 1940 and how she hates the Germans with ferocity. So you have to wonder, what happens that she ends up collaborating? How does she decide to do so?
And you keep wondering and keep wondering. Yes, she’s friends with this German official, who is, of course, likable. Yes, there are all the Resistants who are assholes. Look! It’s moral ambiguity! Except it’s easy, cheating almost: the bad guys you like who are honourable, the good guys who are not. But you notice she never turns, never actually gives information. Her husband joins the Resistance and worries about it more than his children; she doesn’t care about the cause as much as his family. Who is right? It’s hard to say. You can lose your family either way, slow or fast, choosing the cause and having them dead before you win, choosing them and leaving the world in a horrible state.
Sometimes there are no good choices, though this book comes firmly down on the side of family.
Her husband eventually gets killed by the Gestapo. She did not give the information up — in fact, she did not even know about it. But she is on trial for it. The German official comes to her trial. Why, it is the close family friend, the Resistance hero who did so! The Gestapo threatened (and eventually killed) his sister; he informed. No one believes the German — except they all do, she is found not guilty, her kids come back from the train to Auschwitz (they escaped the train) alive, etc.
I did not predict this ending, because I didn’t predict something so “oooh, a TWIST”. It seems like it should have worked, but it just didn’t make it: the book had too many well-developed but cliched characters. The intellectual husband turned insane by war; the non-intellectual wife who is actually very intelligent; the best friend who appears to hate the wife but really wants to sleep with her; the honourable enemy. They were clear personalities, well-done . . . but nothing beyond the stereotypes.
It disappointed me, because there was such promise. The balance between who you owe what to, what you’re willing to give up . . . but it didn’t take it where it could, or should, have (of course, Sophie’s Choice has already been written). I don’t know why not. It doesn’t look like the author petered out, it just seems like things didn’t quite coalesce. Perhaps it’s because I do not really agree with the thought that family always takes precedence over larger causes. I think it is the choice I would make, I do not think I could make the other one: but then, do I have the right to make other people suffer for my causes? It’s not simple, though again, I think this book made it simpler by being so clearly for one side, while I wondered what if everyone chose family over the Resistance? Where does this slide into collaboration/active wrongdoing? (The woman’s mother is an interesting side, though it too was simplified: her father was in the Resistance, though no one in the family knew.)
It’s not that the book didn’t admit to moral ambiguity: it did. But it allowed you to get away without challenging anything; it said, look, you’re smart enough to want ambiguity, here you go, but didn’t take it anywhere past “people aren’t always as they seem” and “sometimes you need to make hard choices and there’s no good choice”. True, yes, but not *interesting*, somehow.
Oddly, the episode of Buffy which first brought these aspects into the show — Lie to Me, one of my favourite episodes ever — didn’t say much more, but just did it better.