Walking the Shadows by
Donald James
hbk out March 03
Published by Century
at £9.99
An American writer, but the story is almost wholly based in the south of
France, where the author certainly knows his territory and has done a great
deal of interesting research on the period when it was ruled by Vichy.
The plot is complex, but satisfying and the whole book is very well-written
and structured. It was a little 'hard to get into' , as they say, but once the
somewhat obscure beginnings had been hurdled, it was page-turner right to
the end. The lead character, Tom Chapel, is a weak man dominated by a
harridan of a mother in New England. He ekes out a living on allowances,
desultory writing and hovering on the fringes of criminality. His failed
marriage to an Englishwoman produced a lovely daughter Romilly, both of
whom now live in Provence. Out of the blue, he is told by lawyers that
Romilly has inherited 28 million dollars, but almost simultaneously, he
learns that she has been assaulted and is in a deep coma in a Nice hospital.
His wife's aged employer, recently killed in an accident, turns out to be the
donor, but no one knows why. His adult son and daughter are outraged and
seek to have the will overturned.
The plot thickens and soon the shadows of the war years reach into the story,
as the old man had been a Resistance fighter helping Jews out of Provence in
1942, as it transpires that even before the Germans took over Vichy France,
there were elements in the French administration who were as bad as the SS
or Gestapo. The Juge d'Instruction supervising Romilly's attack was the son
of a prominent sympathiser and with even more threads introduced from
elsewhere, the plot becomes a very tangled story indeed.
An interesting book, not only for its story-telling value, but for some fifty-
year old history that rarely gets an airing.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
