Having now read it, I’m sure this
was for the first time. I do remember, though, having been puzzled by the name
of the central character, Hilary (the English father searching for his lost
child in postwar France) so I must have at least looked at it. Hilary I knew
only as a surname – Sir Edmund Hilary my earliest hero – or as a girl’s name.
The idea that a man could be called Hilary perhaps put me off. The story itself, as I now know, is by turns moving
and disturbing; it is beautifully told by an author who never wastes words and
has so skilfully constructed the narrative that the resolution is only reached
in the last paragraph of the final page.
It isn’t, however, just the
search for the little boy lost that makes this book compelling. Much of the
tension in the story derives from Laski’s evocation of small-town France, post Vichy,
post war, where the aftermath of four years of conflicted loyalties – of collaboration
and accommodation, of resistance and betrayal, clouds every conversation. Even
the Mother Superior of the Orphanage which may or may not be housing Hilary’s
son has to confess to the moral compromises she felt forced, during the Occupation
and especially after the Liberation in 1944, to make.
For Hilary, compromise is
ethically unthinkable; yet he too must wrestle with the dilemma presented by
the little boy for whom he begins to feel an attachment, although nothing so
far has persuaded him that he is the child of his wife, Lisa. He and she had
separated the day after their son was born, just before the fall of Paris, he
returning to England, she staying in France to join the Resistance, only to be captured
and executed. The Mother Superior tries to persuade Hilary to take on responsibility
for this waif, but Hilary cannot convince himself that this would be fair to
Lisa (since their actual child would then for ever remain unfound) or to
himself.
The later chapters, when he
decides to sever ties with the child and plans to return to England, make
disquieting reading, his self-justifications and attempts at putting the past
behind him being set against the background of a frustrated visit to a local fairground.
Self-justification turns to self-contempt, however, when he realises that a woman
he has agreed to meet at the fair has spent the years of the Occupation enjoying
the company of German soldiers stationed in the town. Ironically, though, it is
a lucky win at one of the fairground stalls that same evening which leads to
the final and wholly unexpected resolution of the novel – as I’ve said, on the
very last page.
Little Boy Lost, a
book I don’t suppose I had thought of for nearly sixty years and which I bought
on impulse, is one I shall now never forget. It has also prompted me to plan on
rereading a book I last read some twenty years ago, Rose Macaulay’s The
World My Wilderness, published within a year of Marghanita Laski’s novel.
This, too, is a novel set in the aftermath of the war; it is also a story of the
consequences of accommodation, collaboration and resistance, focusing especially
on the guerilla activities of the Maquis. The central sections of the novel are
set in London where two childhood friends, who met originally in France, are reunited
and find new life, new friends and new dangers in the bombed-out churches,
offices and houses of the City of London.
I first read The World My
Wilderness not for its topographical or postwar setting but for a different
kind of new life: Macaulay’s representation of the architectural wreckage of
London being repossessed by the wildflowers that transform the rubble of war
into a strangely beautiful brave new world. I included the book in a reading
list I produced for a weekend course on ‘Ruins in Literature’ I taught about
twenty years ago at Madingley Hall, the University of Cambridge Institute of
Continuing Education, where I used to work. I’m eager to re-read and compare it
with Marghanita Laski’s novel.
I am in awe of this book, the title of which perfectly explains its thesis. Not just focusing on, but wonderfully reconstructing, the trial of Pétain in the stifling and claustrophobic Palais de Justice next to Sainte Chapelle in Paris, Jackson demonstrates how the trial exposed a post-Liberation France bitterly divided against itself. Because Pétain had been technically head of state - though even that was a point at issue – France itself was indeed in the dock, and Jackson shows that the whole trial was an indictment not just of one man but of the way a country that had a strong, almost mystical, sense of its grandeur, had failed to defend itself and its citizens or to support its allies. I would not have bought France on Trial if I had not just read Little Boy Lost, but to have read two such books in succession has made my summer.
Adrian Barlow
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