Bobbie Ann Mason has long been considered one of the finest writers of regional fiction — Kentucky is her home and inspiration — but her affecting new novel takes place in France, and she’s just as comfortable and insightful there. Based on the experiences of her late father-in-law, “The Girl in the Blue Beret” describes the tense adventures of a U.S. airman shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. What distinguishes the novel, though, is how tenderly Mason nests that World War II escape within the story of an airline pilot forced to retire in 1980.
After decades of flying jumbo jets, Marshall Stone finds himself widowed, grounded and unemployed, a stark break that blows him back to consider the crash landing of his B-17 bomber that effectively ended his military career when he was just 23. “In the years after,” Mason writes, “he didn’t probe into the aftermath. He lived another life.” But when airline regulations and his wife’s death bring that long domestic chapter to a close, Marshall decides to visit the scarred field in Belgium and “confront his past failure,” back when he was a young lieutenant with a clear and noble purpose. What follows is the profound story of an emotionally aloof retiree who must finally learn to stop flying above everything and embrace the people on the ground who saved his life.
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Ron came to The Post in 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the Book Editor and lead critic. He lives in Bethesda with his wife, an English teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
But this is as much a historical search as a psychological one, and Mason has drawn the details of her downed airman’s ordeal from a range of published histories and interviews, helpfully listed in the back. As an airman behind enemy lines before the D-Day assault, Marshall was entirely at the mercy of civilians who could betray him for a handsome reward or shelter him at risk to their own lives. And everything about him confessed his Americanness: He was too tall, his accent was laughable, he held his cigarettes wrong, and his boots left a little stencil wherever he walked: “USA.” Alternately bored and terrified, he was hidden away in cupboards by sympathetic mothers and shuffled along to Spain by members of the Resistance, passed like a deadly, precious package through the homes of people he could never properly thank or even fully appreciate.
Mason, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first collection of stories in 1983, devotes much of this novel to Marshall’s search for those brave patriots who helped him. The records are obscured by time and disorganized by an impenetrable layer of old code names. “He was wandering through a land of ghosts,” Mason writes, “slivers of memory, clues floating like summer midges.”
What’s more, so much history has fallen down the space between survivors who don’t wish to remember that horror and young people who don’t care about it. Those crumbling records slow Marshall’s progress considerably, and they affect the novel’s pacing, too, producing a story that’s luxuriously contemplative, sustained by the depth of Mason’s sympathy for this old flier. What does it really mean to be a hero? Marshall wonders, contrasting his own panicked behavior after the crash with the actions of those who escorted him right past German guards on the streets of Paris.
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