Book review: Ignorance by Michele Roberts

MICHELE Roberts’s feminist credentials go back a long way and cover many different subjects, from superb historical fiction on the Brontës and Wordsworth’s French mistress, to more contemporary, experimental novels about life in 1970s London.

IGNORANCE

by Michele Roberts

Bloomsbury, 240pp, £14.99

In a kind of circular gesture, though, this latest work has echoes of her 1993 novel Daughters of the House, which concerned the lives of two girls in France just after the Second World War. As something of a companion piece to that novel, this new one takes things a step further, and is every bit as disturbing.

Roberts clearly felt she still had something to say, and there’s a curious urgency in this novel, reflected not least in the cut-off sentences, the jerky rhythm of the prose. Jeanne and Marie-Angele grow up in the same French village, but from different social backgrounds. Jeanne’s mother is a convert from Judaism and a widow who must take in washing to feed and clothe herself and her daughter; Marie-Angele’s father owns the local grocery and has hopes for her future.

Roberts begins by setting her protagonists in a prohibited space, the house that adjoins their convent school, and which is occupied by a Jewish artist. There’s a hint of paedophilia as the man catches them and they pose for pictures, but Marie-Angele’s more provocative gestures enrage him and the girls, terrified, run away. That shared experience – just before the German occupation of France which will send them along very different paths – binds them in strange way.

Truth and lies, and the power of men over women, have long been preoccupations in Roberts’s fiction, and here she excels at both. As the Occupation takes hold, the girls respond in different ways: Jeanne leaves school to work as a cleaner in a brothel, while Marie-Angele catches the eye of a black marketeer, Maurice Blanchard, a worldly-wise older man without scruples who frequents her father’s shop. Power relations are inevitably uneven between them: “I could hide my ignorance most of the time, because if he felt like talking he just wanted me to listen.” They court, Marie-Angele gets pregnant and Maurice decides he will marry her. Meanwhile, after spotting Jeanne in a bar, dressed up and accompanying a German officer, Marie-Angele chooses to believe the gossip that her former school friend is a prostitute, sleeping with Germans. When the war ends and Jeanne, her illegitimate baby girl in her arms, has her head shaved and is publicly paraded before the rest of the villagers for her associations, Marie-Angele feels only revulsion at her behaviour. But the story does not end there, nor is it complete. Jeanne’s version of events is quite different, exposing the ignorance both of the villagers who condemn her, as well as the ignorance of her friend, who believes that a husband with money must also be faithful and good. Maurice hides a Jewish family in Marie-Angele’s family shed; what Marie-Angele doesn’t know is how much money he has extracted from the family to secure their safety. She simply thinks he is a hero.

German-occupied France is a traumatic landscape, full of fear, suspicion and wrongful assumptions, but Roberts skilfully matches that with the landscape of a young woman’s psychological and social experiences – both Jeanne and Marie-Angele have to watch out for predatory men. The ones they think are dangerous, like the Jewish artist, are not the ones who prove to be so. Those who should look out for them fail to do their job; young girls are both threatening and easy to victimise.

Roberts makes subtle comparisons throughout the novel: Jeanne works as a skivvy in the brothel; years later, her illegitimate daughter, Andree, works as a skivvy in the convent where she has been brought up. Andree’s room is a cubicle at the end of the postulants’ and novices’ dormitory where the curtains “jigged to and fro”. The draught whistled in from under the distant door, rattled the ill-fitting sash windows …” Similarly spartan and grim, is her mother Jeanne’s room at the brothel: “My whitewashed room off the kitchen, little more than a windowless cupboard, seemed clean enough. A crucifix, threaded with a spray of palm, hung over the narrow bed …”

Mother and daughter are judged: Jeanne for mistaken alliances with Germans, and Andree for her illegitimate status. Marie-Angele, who consorts with the devil, goes unjudged by her community. The innocents are sacrificed, the guilty go free. It is not a new message but Roberts gives it fresh impetus in this poised, merciless tale whose beautiful writing scarcely eases the pain.