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Charlotte Gray

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Charlotte Gray

By: Sebastian Faulks
Narrated by: Jamie Glover
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About this listen

In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.

©1998 Sebastian Faulks (P)2011 Random House Audio Go 20th Century Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Military Romance War Highlander

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All stars
Most relevant
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this intriguing story which was made all the more enjoyable by Jamie Glover's brilliant rendition. The accents which he uses are particularly praiseworthy, from the "pear-fect" soft Highland intonations of the Gray family to the clipped 1940's BBC accents of the Whitehall chappies - I felt that time & space had been transcended.
The story is of war so it is not a happy tale but it is such a well developed story, obviously meticulously researched, that the human elements of the conflict are all powerful.
Having listened to Faulk's earlier story, "Birdsong" about the First World War, I was quite emotionally moved by the links which he had so cleverly contrived to include in this story. It somehow made it all the more real.

An exceptionally well told story, in every respect

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Very well written I found it sad but with a good ending but not for the millions that perished

Beautiful story sad but the war was ….

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Brilliant narration. If he hasn't received an award for this already he deserves to be given one.
Story I thought was overly wordy in places, but it harrowingly made apparent, why the war had to be fought.

Michael

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The narrator was the perfect person to read this novel. Well done. story not as good as thought seeing as Faulks novel

excellent narrator

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The story was well-told and written at a high-level. But the center of gravity was missing, which if there was one, finds itself belatedly in the inappropriate psychological resolution between Charlotte and her father. If we re-imagine the incident between the two … and, acknowledging Charlotte’s feelings … that a possible violation occurred – that acknowledgment should not have been made by Charlotte’s father but by Charlotte herself. Such an insertion by the author is NOT remotely appropriate, especially since this psychological turn and resolution had no real bearing on the book, — everything had already been accomplished,… It has no impact on Charlotte or the ending that is relevant …… We understand from Charlotte’s feeling, and the inveterate devastation on her life, that this event was real, and in the end is scuttled by the author. Either the father did something while she sat on his lap, in his highly emotional, devastated condition… she felt something other than his constricting arms, squeezing her tightly in a flood of wailing tears, or the author should’ve just taken out the whole Psychological part… To have Charlotte agree with her father’s analysis is sort of creepy.… as a sort of “yeah maybe something happened but memories blotted it out for both of us, so we’ll really never know, so we can agree it never happened.” I don’t even know what to say to that. If the author wants us to make a connection between Charlotte’s wartime experience and her fathers as a way to vicariously work out her difficulties with her father, then the should have woven that notion into the story. This supposed psychological resolution actually makes no difference to the story. Charlotte already did what she did in France and Gregory came back to her … It makes no difference except the author gives her a character dimension that an action story does not require. What’s more, this psychological aspect between her and her father throws the whole story offkilter and dispenses with the already compromised unity of the story… The work never rises to the height worthy of the well-prepared beginning. One wonders if the author is creating a pastiche of genre on purpose … he never positions the work in this way by basing the work on a set of clearly defined genre principles. My goodness, is the work a character study, an adventure, a romance, a wartime drama, a psychological study? The work was all over the place…. Ironically, Charlotte never achieves anything she sets out to do - for example, principally, rescuing Gregory, or making a remarkable contribution to the resistance movement, or preventing the boys from being captured, or saving Julian‘s pitiful father from a bitter psychological end… and then absurdly the author putting into Julian’s father’s mouth, about Julian’s betrayal, “oh, it doesn’t really matter”. Dismissal that is characteristic of this work in general.
— Yes, Charlotte is brave and possesses heroic qualities, but the author falls short of making her into something extraordinary. If his job was to show how above-average people can can rise to the occasion when their desire is greater then their reserve, then he might’ve also woven this idea into the story. Instead, he robs Charlotte of the full complement of hero … which he makes us believe she will achieve… but never shows us or admits the reason that she does not achieve it…
On another note, for me, the author’s greatest strength is his ability to elicit emotional responses of sadness …. … anything having to do with Julian (his heroic love for humanity) with Gregory (his sad persona), with Julian‘s father (his death that accords with a sad, solitary and introspective, life), and with the boys (the horrific ending of their lives, beginning with their parent’s disappearance), to some extent with her father’s wartime stories,…
In the end, listening to the book, somewhere along the way you feel the strength of the work ebbing. I was grateful to have the chance to listen to the book… to be able to experience the many strong qualities at the heart of the work, but most of all for message that a critical project, like winning such a crucial war, depends on the bravery of many, like Charlotte Gray. For this, the author succeeds, but for which the reader must dig.

Center of gravity

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