Monsieur le Commandant

December 9, 2013
An intrigue-filled story set in a grimly fascinating period of history does not make up for a lack of characterization in Slocombe’s first novel to be published in the U.S., which presents itself as a French collaborator’s letter to a German SS officer during the Occupation. As the story begins in pre-WWII France, Paul-Jean Husson is a successful, critically acclaimed writer of fiction, drama, and verse. With his wife, Marguerite, he has two grown children, Jeanne and Olivier. He is also a Nazi sympathizer who feels that France has become “gangrenous with the corrupting individualism born of that absurd republican theory of human rights.” Olivier, a violinist, returns from a trip to Berlin with the Paris Symphony with a German actress, Elsie Berger, and Paul-Jean is pleased, as well as strongly attracted to Elsie. When Olivier and Elsie marry two years later, in 1934, however, Paul-Jean starts to suspect she is Jewish, which, if true, would have dire consequences for the family after the Nazi takeover. The problem here is not Paul-Jean’s loathsomeness but that he is written as little more than a caricature. The fact that the book is told from his point of view anchors the narrative in the shallowest of waters.