The Time Between Us
How many romantic novels set in Occupied France in WW2 can the market take? They seem to cascade off the press. As usual, this one is about an American soldier and a French girl, but is unlike most others. First of all, it begins before the war, in the late 1930s, before William becomes a soldier, when he is a student and encounters Elise while visiting her brother. The war separates them, then William enlists and is killed on the Normandy beaches.
The war takes up only a short section of the book, and most of it concerns the postwar years. It is rather as if Juliet had survived Romeo and had had to cope with life, or fail to do so, in the long years to come. Elise marries William’s comrade-in-arms, Hank, and settles in America. There is no happy-ever-after, but Hank finds redemption of a sort through his son and his granddaughter. The first part of the book is set out as a dual narrative, telling Elise’s life before and during the war alongside her granddaughter’s visit to France to research it sixty years later. The latter part is largely told by Hank up to his death in the 1990s.
The characterisation of the male and female characters is equally convincing, and the French setting, in rural Normandy, is particularly evocative. This is a strange, poignant story with happiness and grief in equal measure. Life is never perfect, but we can find fulfilment if not in our own lives, at least through the lives of our children and grandchildren.
