The Hidden
Jersey under German occupation in the Second World War. Dora Simon is a German-Jewish refugee in her mid-20s, working as a midwife on the island. She has to be very careful to hide her true identity from bureaucratic investigations by the Nazis’ islander administrative minions and the Nazis themselves. When she starts a love affair with the widowed father of one of her young patients who had been carrying the child of a soldier of the invading force, it has immense consequences for both of them. Meanwhile, Joe McClarty is a young Irish priest living on Jersey. They all get themselves enmeshed in a web of deceit, abysmal horror and treachery.
While the narrative is centred on wartime Jersey, elements are from Dora and Joe looking back on those eventful, dreadful days in 1985. Both are once more forced to confront the awful events of wartime Jersey, when a revenant from those days tracks them down. The structure of the first part of the book only gives the back story to the reader en passant with hints and oblique references, so the reader has to spend a large element of the book in working out what is going on and relating it to the situation in 1985, as the reader understands it. Otherwise it’s an easy and enjoyable book to read, and at most times I felt that this story is just that—a story, highly entertaining, but not one that resonates with the essential and credible truth of human behaviour. Possibly there were just too many familiar and even clichéd situations to allow one to become utterly immersed in the narrative—perhaps the difference between competent and excellent fiction. Nevertheless, it is well-researched historical fiction that tells a tale from terrible times that still needs to be told.
