Love in the time of war

By STEPHANIE MISKELL*

These two novels share many of the same ingredients: a French setting, the human cost of war, all-consuming love affairs, art, mysteries from the past, obsession, guilt, loss.

Canadian-born Nancy Huston has set The Mark of the Angel in late-1950s Paris, at the time of the Algerian uprisings, when France sent 400,000 young Frenchmen to pacify its reluctant colony.

France is enjoying postwar economic good times, with TVs, cars and Brigitte Bardot, but under the surface, all is not well. Algerians (or any Muslims) in Paris are harassed by the authorities and ignored by the French people in an alarming parallel to the treatment of the Jews a decade or two earlier.

Although at the periphery of the narrative, this larger story is as much Huston's subject as the central story, which concerns a tragic love triangle. A brilliant French flautist falls in love with and marries a mysterious, silent German girl who answers his ad for a live-in maid. Severely traumatised by her childhood wartime experiences, she is unable to return love until she meets a Hungarian Jew who has taken the Algerians' cause to heart.

The novel is written in the present tense, with frequent authorial asides. The ironic distance created between the narrative voice and the events portrayed serves to heighten the powerful effect of the novel's tragedy, both personal and political. Excellent stuff.

Sanchez' Day of the Bees also centres on tragic love: a passionate affair between a famous Spanish painter, Zermano, and his French lover and muse, Louise. The lovers are separated by the German occupation of France. Inexplicably, after the war Louise chooses to remain hidden from Zermano, while he keeps her memory alive through the decades as the enigmatic subject of his increasingly sought-after paintings.

Fifty years later, an American art historian discovers Louise's unposted letters to Zermano, which reveal the extraordinary nature of her wartime ordeal in Vichy-controlled Provence.

The writing is highly charged with emotional energy and earnestness. It's a heady mix of sex, violence, history, art, beekeeping, transcendent love and courage, set against the evocative backdrops of Provence and Mallorca.

Sanchez' sense of history and place, and his control of the unfolding mystery of the narrative, are the novel's strengths. However, the writing at times seems excessively lyrical in its desire to convince the reader of the force of the characters' love and anguish. Still, this goes with the territory, and if you like your passion strong, then this meticulously crafted and researched novel will deliver.

The Mark of the Angel

By Nancy Huston

Vintage $24.95

Day of the Bees

By Thomas Sanchez

Flamingo $29.95

* Stephanie Miskell teaches English at Northcote College.