Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available from Sunday 3 August and will be available to listen online or for download.
Allan Massie is a genuine man of letters – novelist, journalist, historian, and a man who can’t imagine a day without writing in his study, deep in the heart of the Scottish Borders. I found myself turning recently to his account of the union between Scotland and England, The Thistle and the Rose, for reasons that will be obvious. It’s an exploration of the whole tangled relationship, its moments of intimacy and strain, and above all a highly-literate cultural evaluation of centuries of war and partnership. When we turned for this month’s Bookclub to Allan’s novel A Question of Loyalties, we were also tuning in to his historical sense. The story is a journey into the modern history of France, specifically the trauma of the Second World War and the cooperation of the Vichy regime with the Nazis after Hitler’s invasion of 1940. But Allan is not a writer who writes novels to deliver a message: he told us that it’s not something he sets out to do. He believes that fiction is, above all, about feelings and in A Question of Loyalties – the plural in the title is important – the revelation of the agony of France comes through the experience of one family, distilled in the relationship between a son, Etienne de Balafré, and his father Lucien. The story chronicles Etienne’s search for the truth about Lucien, who was a man of government in the years of turmoil and who was ensnared in the moral ambiguities of his time.
But Allan’s horizon is wide. The story moves across Europe, and through different eras. It speaks of the heart (‘one of the best love affairs I’ve written’ Allan said, without sounding at all boastful) and catches the sweep of public affairs and national moods. Above all, it deals with the question of what matters most to individuals (or what should matter most). The answer is clear: personal relationships, individual loyalty. In the course of the journey, we’re taken into a period in the history of France which has often been sanitised after the fact. As Allan put it to our readers, there weren’t easy answers available to most of the French in 1940. Most people in this country thought the French had let us down; they thought we had let them down. And when Marshal Pétain set up his government in Vichy and entered an accommodation with Hitler’s occupiers (including a willing participation in the transport of Jews to the concentration camps) it was easy to understand, in Allan’s view, why so many people in France went along with it. In the early days of the war, the resistance was tiny. The difficulty of acknowledging that fact would become traumatic for France in the post-war era, and Etienne’s story involves the turning over the pages of a troubling history, inside his family and beyond. How much did his father know? Could he have lived differently, and would that have made him a better man or not?
Etienne uses his father’s papers to uncover the story, and naturally it involves real people – Pétain himself, Charles de Gaulle, the Vichy prime minister Lavalle, and others. But Allan’s method is to portray them through the eyes of the fictional characters (he noted that Sir Walter Scott did the same thing, and rather successfully…). The French politicians are seen through the eyes of Lucien and then they’re filtered through Etienne so that the reader is two removes from them. ‘The reader may say – “how do you know what Marshal Petain is thinking?” But if you were Lucien, saying “I think this is what I think Petain was thinking” in an odd way, because it’s invented it’s more credible.’
An intriguing thought. I hope you enjoy hearing Allan Massie talking about A Question of Loyalties, which is one of my favourite novels.
Happy reading
Jim
Jim Naughtie is the presenter Bookclub on BBC Radio 4