Backwards and forwards: imagining wartime

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I’ve recently read two fascinating novels that take place during the Second World War. Both of these books, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, follow several characters (and groups of characters) through a range of wartime experiences in the 1940s.

Over sixty years separate the writing of these wartime imaginings although both novels were published (in English) at around the same time.

Much has been written elsewhere about the tragic back story to Suite Francaise. Nemirovsky,  whose life was cut short when she was deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942, left behind an unfinished manuscript called Suite Francaise. The manuscript was rediscovered in a notebook by Nemirovsky’s daughter in the late 1990s and was published in France in 2004 to great critical acclaim.

The published book, which consists of two parts, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’, is really only a fragment of what Nemirovsky intended for Suite Francaise. There were to be an additional three sections, ‘Captivity’, ‘Battles’ and ‘Peace’, some of the content of which could only be determined by the outcome of the war.

One of the most remarkable things about Suite Francaise is that it was written almost contemporaneously with events it describes. ‘Storm in June’ takes place in 1940 and follows several groups of characters as they flee Paris ahead of the arrival of the German troops. Almost like reportage, you get a real sense of what it would be like to have to flee your city and compete with the hordes for food, shelter and access to transport. These events bring out the humane decency of some characters and reprehensible behaviour in others.

The ‘Dolce’ section focuses on several characters in the small German-occupied town of Bussy in 1941 where the French townspeople and German army lead an uneasy coexistence:

War … yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to each other. We tell ourselves, “They’re just like us, after all,” but they’re not at all the same. We’re two different species, irreconcilable, enemies forever.

Considering the lack of critical distance, Suite Francaise displays great wisdom and balance in its potrayal of French and German characters. It really was a beautiful, bittersweet book and I wish it could have been completed as intended.

While the fragmented Suite Francaise moves forward and is completed retrospectively by our knowledge of Nemirovsky’s fate and the outcomes of the Second World War, The Night Watch moves chronologically backwards in three parts. Set in London, the novel begins after the war in 1947, it then moves back to the bombings of 1944  before finishing during the Blitz in 1941.

The narrative focuses on four Londoners, whose lives intersect at various unexpected points. Because of the unusual chronological structure, we follow the four characters not to find out what happens to them but to discover how they began. For me, this has uneven results, by the time you get to the second section, you start to fill in the gaps left by the first section; but the third section, which has a really dramatic incident, is really weakened by this treatment. Somehow these earlier incidents are not as interesting when told in reverse.

However, I did enjoy The Night Watch, it was extremely well-written, the characters were well-drawn and the attention to historical detail gave the novel a great realism and sense of wartime atmosphere.

They might have been walking through murky water, so absolutely strange and dense was the quality of the night here, and so freighted with violence and loss.

I liked the combination of dramatic scenes – air raids and rescues from bomb sites - and the depiction of the mundane realities and deprivations of life in the 1940s. The success of the narrative structure is debatable but it is well worth reading to decide for yourself.

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