However, after a couple seconds have elapsed, Josie immediately answers all of Marie’s questions. A woman named Josie tells her to stop, since their mission is classified. When Marie gets to training, she starts asking questions. Yet, in spite of this, nothing in The Lost Girls of Paris feels the least bit realistic or authentic.įor example, even though the SOE operates in the shadows, in putative confidentiality, no one knows the first thing about secrecy (which is not to tell everyone everything the first time you are asked). Jenoff has an extensive and laudable resume, including a master’s in history from Cambridge, a juris doctorate, and experience working with the State Department. What’s more, she sends Marie to France with the exact same radio she destroyed, and forced Marie to put back together! This has repercussions. Subsequently, despite Marie’s total lack of fitness for the job, Eleanor taps her for insertion into Occupied France. In a fit of temper, Eleanor destroys Marie’s radio, and then orders her to put it back together. At one point, Eleanor becomes frustrated with Marie during training, because Marie is terrible at being a secret agent. Indeed, she apparently exists in a world in which common sense and reason have been banished. Of course, it would be unfair to make Marie carry the entire burden of unfathomable judgment. Me, for expecting some internal logic that is not at odds with an ordinary understanding of the universe. Marie, for her inability to ever be right, even by accident.
STOW YOUR FEAR MOVIE
To paraphrase the movie Home Alone, Marie “is what the French call les incompeténts.” At almost every inflection point in the novel she does something so baffling that it utterly destroys any sympathy you might have for her. Beyond that, she is nothing more than a vessel of impulsive and bizarre decisions. The problem is the central conceit that Eleanor would be put in charge of secret agents, and that Marie would be allowed to be one of those agents. They share the same slapdash plotting and reason-free decision-making that mar our time with Grace. This is not to say that the chapters concerning Eleanor and Marie are any better (the book is split into viewpoint chapters shared between the three women), because they certainly are not. Grace is in postwar New York, getting the vapors every time she thinks about Mark. That is drama (or at least it would be, in a better book). Eleanor and Marie are in London and Occupied France respectively, in a life and death situation. More than that, it is a lame distraction. Grace has no good reason for doing any of the things that she does her actions are dictated by plot mechanics, which is too bad, because Grace’s plot is entirely needless. The ridiculous absence of motivation for any of these actions is a hallmark of The Lost Girls of Paris. For further inexplicable reasons, she embarks on a crusade to find out who those women are. For inexplicable reasons, she takes those pictures. For inexplicable reasons, she opens up the suitcase and finds some pictures of women in uniform. I probably should have followed that instinct.Īnyway, Grace wanders into Grand Central Station and sees an abandoned suitcase. Typically, when I read a line like that, on literally the second page of the book, I quit reading. In fact, she cannot get the “delicious-but-wrong-smell of Mark’s aftershave” out of her head. She is on her way to work and is very flustered because she has just slept with her dead husband’s best friend. Things begin with Grace in postwar New York City. Her secondary attribute is widow, a circumstance that defines her. Eleanor and Maria share the same timeline, operating mostly in 1944, in the weeks leading up to the D-Day landings in Normandy. Maria is one of her agents, and her secondary attribute is – and there is really no other word for it – stupidity. Eleanor is in charge of the female operatives, and aside from being a woman, she is outspoken. They all have names, and each are given exactly two attributes, with one of those attributes the fact that they have two X chromosomes. These three women are “characters” in only the loosest sense of the word. The Lost Girls of Paris is focused on three women operating in two different timelines, a needless convolution that insistently strips what little drama emerges organically from the narrative. Unfortunately, this great idea is squandered in a book of such mediocrity I hesitate to say anything further.
The concept of Pam Jenoff’s The Lost Girls of Paris is excellent: a World War II thriller based on the missions of the real-life women of the Special Operations Executive. It has been awhile since I read a book with a wider gap between idea and execution. Winston Churchill to Hugh Dalton, first director of the Special Operations Executive
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