When asked on Desert Island Discs how and why he “writes women so extraordinarily well”, Faulks replied: “we are now allowed to admit I think - those wars having been fought and won - that there are small but significant differences between most men and most women. And one of the more interesting ones to play around with is the idea that men don't really inspect in a continuous way their inner lives and feelings and the development of their states of mind - whereas women tend to keep a more running audit. And it seems to me that this gives some dramatic possibility to a novelist."
This is why if you saw and were disappointed by the film that this book inspired, you should give the printed word a go. Faulks has a remarkable ability to get inside people’s heads and write stories that evolve through people’s thoughts as well as actions – and this is the story of Charlotte Gray and why it is such a good book.
July 2009 Guest Editor Louise Wener on Charlotte Gray by SEBASTIAN FAULKS This is a wonderful book. A haunting story of love and war set in London and occupied France in 1942-3. It's an intensely moving and passionate novel, full of insight into the way ordinary people can so easily slip into barbarism. Tremendously effecting, it has stayed with me since I first read it some years ago. On top of the gorgeous and provocative writing, the narrative is utterly gripping and sustaining.
In 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. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years', here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him. In Charlotte's friendship with both men, Faulks opens up the theme of false memory and of paradises—both national and personal—that appear irredeemably lost. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.
