Beck, at Le Jardin-Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability.

Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone-food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Some of the key moments of the book-notably an encounter with a frightened German soldier-are very effective. If Will is an absolutist, then Tristan is a situationist when Will asks him whether he has any principles, he replies, “No. That’s the kind of thing that can get a fellow in trouble in the king’s army-and so, too, the forbidden love that Will and Tristan share.

In time, the seditious spirit will spread to Will, who, for complex and subtle reasons, has decided to become an “absolutist”-that is, to have absolutely no part in the war effort, not even as a stretcher bearer. One is killed off fairly early on in the proceedings, but not before he has had the chance to trouble the unit with doubts about just what this war among royal cousins is all about. As for the rest: Well, Boyne honors convention by giving each soldier a turn in the spotlight, sometimes briefly, sometimes for symbolic purposes. Sadler is at once shattered and defiant: He has survived the horrors of the Western Front, one of just two boys-and boys most of them were-in his basic training unit to make it out alive. A novel set in the trenches of World War I, one of several by Irish author Boyne ( The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 2006, etc.) staged amid the 20th century’s worst moments.Īs the story opens, Tristan Sadler, who has just turned 21, is in the countryside north of London, looking to deliver a packet of letters from a wartime friend, Will Bancroft, to Will’s sister.

The Absolutist by John Boyne