Gracq’s novel details the phoney war of 1939-1940, seen from the perspective of a French lieutenant, Grange, sent to the Ardennes on the Belgian border. He lives in a bunker on the deep forest. There is a village nearby. He engages in an affair with a local girl. The war is happening elsewhere, in Finland, in Eastern Europe. If anything, Grange, about whose history we learn little, seems to enter into a Walden-ian reverie. The forest cradles him. He savours his walks and his isolation, holed up as he is with a few other soldiers under his command. There is a slow burning fuse to this life and the novel, which is the imminent arrival of the German forces, but for now he lives in the present, the past at arm’s length and the future held in abeyance. It’s a curious novel, with the tension between what is to come (the war) and what is happening (not a lot) making for a strange, hypnotic energy. It’s also interesting how Gracq has his protagonist compare memories of the start of the First World War with the start of the Second. That was a festive, foolish time. This is a cautious, uncertain time, a breathing space, before the world changes forever all over again.
It’s perhaps worth also considering how this novel, published over a decade after the war ended, might have been received in France, a country whose relationship with the Second World War is more complex that our British take. The ambivalent, oneiric time that Gracq documents is also the ambivalent time before the nation would be split in two, in more ways than one.
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