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Returning to an escape
By Daniel Swift |
July 24, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
BOBBIE Ann Mason's new novel opens with a little history. A note explains that "during World War II, thousands of Allied aviators crashed or parachuted into Occupied Europe," and many were helped home by the "escape-and-evasion networks" of the French Resistance. This information is followed by the roster of a flight crew based at Molesworth Airfield in England, home of the 303rd Bomb Group - specifically the men who took one Flying Fortress, the Dirty Lily, on a raid over Frankfurt on January 31, 1944. This squadron did indeed bomb this German city from this airfield, but not on this night. And the names of the crew are fictitious. "The Girl in the Blue Beret" is a work in which the real and imaginary are joined.
The novel's hero, Marshall Stone, was the co-pilot on that raid, which ended with a crash landing in a field in Belgium. He escaped through France and into Spain with the help of the Resistance, and more than 35 years later, as the novel begins, he is 60, a widower, newly retired. "I'd like to retrace the trail I took through France in '44," he tells his daughter as he sets out on what she terms "a little trip to the past." He rents an apartment in Paris and tracks down some of the people who helped him. Like its hero, the novel floats between one time and another, between Marshall's memories and his sleuthing decades later.
As in Mason's best-known novel, "In Country," the narrative dwells on the effects of war that can be felt long after the fighting is over, but for Marshall the present turns out to have its particular satisfactions. Two women offer themselves as romantic partners: Caroline has "pop-out breasts" and feeds him langoustines; Annette has "ample, well-formed breasts" and makes him a quiche Lorraine. Given these distractions, he spends a surprising amount of time thinking about the astronaut Neil Armstrong and the horrors of the Holocaust.
This is the kind of novel in which even a name is an opportunity. So it might not be wholly accidental that Stone is strong and taciturn, that this military man's first name is Marshall. Inside every characterization lurks the possibility of parody. While eating a baguette, a Frenchman called Pierre compares the bombers overhead to "the streaming rows of cloud like breaths on a cold morning." Elsewhere Annette declares: "I never want to miss the full moon. It is one of my principal joys!" These are stereotypical French people who drink Calvados before lunch and eat tarte Tatin after, who wear berets and fall swiftly in and out of love. Here the Germans are barbaric, but they follow the rules; the Americans have big feet and are lovably clumsy.
This all sounds cheap and obvious, but it's also sincere and well meant. Mason has given us a portrait of a man from a generation whose members were uncertain about the protocols of letting oneself feel. And she has lovingly captured the tone of bluff assertion still shared by veterans of that war. Marshall's banality has the ring of truth; his awkwardness reveals much.
Mason never judges. Nothing in the novel's tone or plot steps outside the worldview of Marshall Stone. Its limitations are those of its characters, its weaknesses the price of its fidelity. In her acknowledgements, Mason notes: "This novel was inspired by the World War II experience of my father-in-law, Barney Rawlings (1920-2004)." "The Girl in the Blue Beret" is a work of remarkable empathy, if not of remarkable creativity.
The novel's hero, Marshall Stone, was the co-pilot on that raid, which ended with a crash landing in a field in Belgium. He escaped through France and into Spain with the help of the Resistance, and more than 35 years later, as the novel begins, he is 60, a widower, newly retired. "I'd like to retrace the trail I took through France in '44," he tells his daughter as he sets out on what she terms "a little trip to the past." He rents an apartment in Paris and tracks down some of the people who helped him. Like its hero, the novel floats between one time and another, between Marshall's memories and his sleuthing decades later.
As in Mason's best-known novel, "In Country," the narrative dwells on the effects of war that can be felt long after the fighting is over, but for Marshall the present turns out to have its particular satisfactions. Two women offer themselves as romantic partners: Caroline has "pop-out breasts" and feeds him langoustines; Annette has "ample, well-formed breasts" and makes him a quiche Lorraine. Given these distractions, he spends a surprising amount of time thinking about the astronaut Neil Armstrong and the horrors of the Holocaust.
This is the kind of novel in which even a name is an opportunity. So it might not be wholly accidental that Stone is strong and taciturn, that this military man's first name is Marshall. Inside every characterization lurks the possibility of parody. While eating a baguette, a Frenchman called Pierre compares the bombers overhead to "the streaming rows of cloud like breaths on a cold morning." Elsewhere Annette declares: "I never want to miss the full moon. It is one of my principal joys!" These are stereotypical French people who drink Calvados before lunch and eat tarte Tatin after, who wear berets and fall swiftly in and out of love. Here the Germans are barbaric, but they follow the rules; the Americans have big feet and are lovably clumsy.
This all sounds cheap and obvious, but it's also sincere and well meant. Mason has given us a portrait of a man from a generation whose members were uncertain about the protocols of letting oneself feel. And she has lovingly captured the tone of bluff assertion still shared by veterans of that war. Marshall's banality has the ring of truth; his awkwardness reveals much.
Mason never judges. Nothing in the novel's tone or plot steps outside the worldview of Marshall Stone. Its limitations are those of its characters, its weaknesses the price of its fidelity. In her acknowledgements, Mason notes: "This novel was inspired by the World War II experience of my father-in-law, Barney Rawlings (1920-2004)." "The Girl in the Blue Beret" is a work of remarkable empathy, if not of remarkable creativity.
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