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Feb. 28th, 2018 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsjothra gave me Kate Quinn's novel The Alice Network as a holiday present under the correct assumption that it's highly relevant to my interests, by which I mean it's all about ALL-FEMALE SPY NETWORKS. The A-timeline: in 1947, Charlie, an unmarried, pregnant American college girl, attempts to track down her missing cousin Rose, who vanished in occupied France. She ends up at the doorstep of Eve Gardiner, a traumatized alcoholic former spy, and the two of them plus Eve's chauffeur all go on a life-changing field trip across postwar Europe in the hopes of finding the missing cousin and also getting revenge on Eve's long-lost nemesis!
The B-timeline: In 1915, Eve works undercover in Lille with Actual Historical Spies Louise de Bettignies and Marie-Leonie van Houtte, and while Charlie's plotline is fine and all everything that happens in this part of the story is about three times as interesting, both because Eve is an interesting and competent character, and because Actual Historical Spy Louise de Bettignies is the best character in the book BY FAR.
By this point, if you've read Code Name Verity, inevitably comparisons will be invited, and I will tell you: even the best parts of this book are not anywhere near as good as Code Name Verity. But it does focus on women in espionage and women's experiences in wartime, and places all-important relationships between women front and center, and will scratch some of the itch. It's doing several things that I like and also some things that I don't like:
- the book is structured, as I said, around extremely intense and important relationships between women, but Charlie and Eve both have very pasted-on feeling heterosexual romances with Dashing Scottish Men ten years older than their teenaged selves (it's ~parallelism!~) and, like .... they're fine, I guess ... but why? Why.
- somewhat relatedly, it's definitely aiming to be a Feminist Book and leans into double standards and gendered trauma, but 'feminism' is about where it stops. Not much discussion of other angles of oppression, which feels like a fairly significant gap in a book set largely in 1947, in Europe, immediately after WWII. Nazi genocide is represented by the massacred French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, which, don't get me wrong, was a horrible thing and is worth writing about and remembering, and by a symbolic unnamed dead Gypsy (sic) girl in a concentration camp who died immediately after liberation and is important because Charlie's Dashing Scottish Love Interest has PTSD about it. Not a single appearance or reference to any character besides that one dead unnamed girl who was or might be targeted specifically because of their membership in a marginalized group, not a single reference to the targeting of marginalized groups other than the fact of the dead girl's ethnicity. And I absolutely do not think every book about WWII needs to be about the Holocaust, and certainly this book does not need to be about the Holocaust, but it is a little weird to read a book set in that time and place in which as far as I can remember the word "Jew" literally never appears.
- and I mean I think the book's obliviousness on various axes is sort of exemplified by the fact that in the last chapter of the book Eve decides that she is going to seek recovery from her trauma by .... becoming a BIG GAME HUNTER IN AFRICA? I think I just put the book down at this point and said 'what' out loud.
Anyway, all that said, I'm also very grateful to this book for introducing me to Louise de Bettignies, of whom I had vaguely heard but did not know much about; I am going to be tracking down biographies as soon as humanly possible
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Date: 2018-03-01 05:20 am (UTC)Speaking of Actual Historical Spies, I assume you have seen that Nancy Wake's autobiography is available on Kindle and just as gonzo as it always sounded?
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Date: 2018-03-03 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 02:58 am (UTC)FORTUNATELY I THINK THAT'S WHAT E-BOOKS ARE FOR
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Date: 2018-03-01 09:32 am (UTC)Does The Alice Network contain similar content?
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Date: 2018-03-03 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-01 05:36 pm (UTC)I just read a fascinating book about war propaganda, which interestingly enough said that Nazis were portrayed as cruel and bad in all sorts of ways by the Allies in WWII, but a lot of those stories were made up. This is typical of all war propaganda, but in WWII it's especially strange because the concentration camps, which actually did happen and would be considered the Nazis' most horrible deed by most people today, were hardly talked about. And they weren't much talked about in the years immediately after, either. The book I read attributed this partly to its being almost too surreal to be true (so that it would have been read as too-exaggerated propaganda), and also to antisemitism among the Allies (although not as much as among the Nazis, obviously).
Like, there's a 1941 quote from Britain with instructions about how to do anti-Nazi propaganda for the home front, which says that the Nazis must be portrayed to do horrible things, but only to obviously innocent victims, not to violent political dissenters (meaning leftist protesters, I suppose), or to Jews.
Maybe you already know these things! I didn't know and found them fascinating (in a sort of queasy way).
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Date: 2018-03-03 01:55 am (UTC)(I don't let this book off the hook in this case, because one of the characters actually has seen the concentration camps, but I do wonder if its choices stem from sort of a similar impulse; 'let's show how horrible the war was for Obviously Ordinary People!')
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Date: 2018-03-03 03:18 am (UTC)The Stranger was the first feature film to include footage of the camps. There are earlier films that engage with the idea or attempt sanitized depictions—I'm afraid some of the links are now dead, but a bunch of examples came up in comments to my post on Mr. Skeffington (1944), because it's the earliest movie of my acquaintance to present a Jewish character who's been through the Holocaust. I note now that it was a Warners production, which makes sense, but its combination of cutting-edge social justice and women's picture soap is still one hundred percent batshit.
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Date: 2018-03-03 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 03:08 am (UTC)Thanks to Joseph Breen being a raging anti-Semite as well as a moralizing asshat, the Production Code Administration actively blocked the making of anti-Nazi films in Hollywood in the 1930's, references to Nazi anti-Semitism very strongly included. Warner Bros. eventually broke the first taboo with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), but they had to forfeit any explicit mention of the treatment of Jews to do it.
[edit] I would also love the info on the book. I had not heard about the British propaganda instructions you cite.
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Date: 2018-03-03 01:02 pm (UTC)ETA: The source for the quote about British propaganda instructions is A Concise History of American Antisemitism by Robert Michael (2005), but it doesn't give a page number.
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Date: 2018-03-07 09:17 pm (UTC)That's all right. Thank you for this information!
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Date: 2018-03-03 07:13 pm (UTC)I haven't read it yet, though, so your review is helpful! I'll know what to be prepared for.
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Date: 2018-03-18 04:20 am (UTC)