Suite Française

"Like The Heat of the Day , this is a contemporary account. Némirovsky was experiencing the war in real time. It’s not a finished book, as many people might know: it’s the first two parts of what should have been a five-part collection. Suite Française will always be shadowed by the tragedy of its incompleteness, because Némirovsky, a Ukrainian-born Jew, was deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942 and murdered within a month of her arrival. Némirovsky and her family had converted to Catholicism. When they moved to Paris, they had been very focused on assimilating into French society, but under German racial laws that just didn’t matter. It’s a novel focused on displacement, which was an enormous part of the Second World War. The first part, ‘A Storm in June’, examines the flight of families from Paris as the Germans close in, which is obviously something Némirovsky experienced. They desperately cling on to things they hold dear. The second part, ‘Dolce,’ examines life under the occupation in a small village, which is what Némirovsky was living in at the time she was writing. It’s a very pointed and candid examination of French society, which hadn’t yet recovered from the First World War. There are very visible scars, both physical and mental, and she’s fascinated with the way in which different classes in society respond to the war, and how the occupation can bring out both the best and worst in people. Deprivation can serve as a barrier to community, because people don’t have the capacity to look after each other when they can’t look after themselves. She examines whether that’s an implicit moral failure in the human condition or simply a mechanism of survival. She’s very critical of the upper classes, in particular. That’s the class to which she herself belonged. Considering it’s not finished, it’s not edited, it’s not polished, it’s an extraordinary novel. It actually does read as very polished and very moving. It’s interesting to think where she would have taken it if she’d had the opportunity to revise it. It’s just such a moving, moving book, and the story of how it came to be published is almost part of the story itself. Her daughter carried it around in a suitcase for 60 years before it was published. It’s so sad, but again, an eyewitness account. The best research I did was in the Imperial War Museum in London. They have a sound archive . They interviewed as many people connected to the war as they could. You can just sit there and listen to them. It’s fascinating to put voices to people you’ve been reading about in history books, it adds so much colour. I love the very human aspects—you can hear people sucking on cigarettes, you can hear them pause when they’re finding something very difficult to talk about, you can tell when they are holding back, hesitant to say something. It’s a brilliant resource, and I don’t know if many people really know about it outside of academia, but anyone can make an appointment to go and listen. Also, in the National Archives, I went through the personnel files of women who were involved in the Special Operation Executive, which features in my book. The personnel accounts are very dry—names and dates, where people lived—but there was one bit of paper in a file belonging to an agent called Noor Inayat Khan, an extraordinary woman, who practiced the signature of her alias over and over again, trying to drill it into her head, trying to make it look natural. She’d got a bit of ink on her thumb and left a thumbprint on the paper. Suddenly there she was: this person, right there in front of me."