Books: Bobbie Ann Mason’s ‘The Girl in the Blue Beret’
And what a stirring tribute to the Resistance this novel is, along with a heartfelt salute to the ordinary women and even girls who sprinkled sand in the gears of Hitler’s army, fighting back in innumerable subtle ways against the Occupation. As Marshall continues his search, he talks with teachers who sheltered parachutists who dropped in the schoolyard, teenagers who smooched with Yanks to throw off street guards, and mothers who sewed Parisian disguises and printed fake ID papers — all for young soldiers who had little sense of the risks their hosts were taking.
Mason’s most elegant move is the way she interlaces Marshall’s patient search for those who helped him with adrenaline-filled reenactments of the plane crash, his escape from German soldiers and then those weeks of hiding. These are exciting scenes, told first in shattering snippets that eventually coalesce as Marshall recalls more and more of what happened to him. It’s a masterly technique that re-creates the creaky workings of memory along with the frightening adventure of a razor-thin escape.
More from Ron Charles
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.
Significantly, the most harrowing moments of this novel belong not to Marshall but to those French women who helped him and paid for their bravery with time in German work camps. Mason honors those victims with a clear-eyed, starkly personal portrayal of what they endured even beyond the brutal labor: systematic rape, infanticide, death marches and shootings. “It’s only becoming real to me now,” Marshall says, and many readers are likely to feel the same way about this lesser-known facet of the Nazi program.
Such arresting, gory history is easy to overplay, of course — what the critic Melvin Bukiet once dismissed as Holocaust porn. But Mason is far more interested in the grace and resilience of these prisoners than in the cruelty of their tormentors. “There was so little food,” one survivor tells Marshall, “that to save your life you had to steal; to save your humanity you had to share.” In the act of returning to those courageous women and conveying his long-delayed gratitude, Marshall discovers the depth of his own humanity, too.
Mason’s fans know that she has addressed the lingering effects of war before. Her first novel, “In Country” from 1985, dealt with the shadow of Vietnam. (A movie version starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd appeared a few years later.) World War II was a very different kind of war, of course, with cleaner motives and a far more definite conclusion. But once again, Mason has plumbed the moral dimensions of national conflict in the lives of individual participants and produced a deeply moving, relevant novel.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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