The Paris Assignment
Paris, 1931. Bowen’s story has a conventional beginning: Naïve young English girl, Madeleine Grant, goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and immediately falls for a charming French journalist, Giles Martin. He disappears, re-appears, gets her pregnant, and marries her. Flash forward eight years when the Nazis overwhelm Paris. Giles, half-Jewish and rising star of the political left, joins the resistance forces, and sends his wife and their son Olivier back to her family in England.
The novel becomes compellingly complicated at this point. Madeleine must deal with the Blitz in London and decides to send her son to the country for safety. Almost immediately, she learns that he has been killed when his train was bombed. Heartbroken, she enlists in the British secret service. Bowen painstakingly describes the difficult and extensive mental and physical training that women candidates receive before they are allowed to go to France to work undercover against the Nazis. The women Madeleine trains with are an engaging group of different personalities who enliven the plot.
Meanwhile, the reader discovers that Olivier’s identity has become confused with another boy. Surviving a concussion, but confused about his circumstances, he is sent off to Australia as an orphan where he lives on a farm run by brutal Irish nuns.
The novel alternates between Olivier’s and Madeleine’s experiences. Bowen perfectly develops both narratives with absorbing details about several characters and different geographical environments. And she tops her story off with a realistic, satisfying ending!
