USA TODAY International Edition
‘Lost Girls’ finds truth beats fiction by far
Pam Jenoff has forged a career from looking backward, examining the lives of people living in the middle of history – most often World War II, as in 2017’s “The Orphan’s Tale” – and forcing her characters to tackle some of life’s profound questions. Who are we, who do we value, and who do we trust when faced with the very worst circumstances?
This emotional profundity is sadly lacking in Jenoff ’s latest, “The Lost Girls of Paris” (Park Row Books, 377 pp., ★★g☆), which fictionalizes the true story of Vera Atkins and her team of Special Operations Executive spies – many of them young women – who advanced into France before D-Day to help the British defeat the Germans. Atkins’ life and her eventual search for the missing women under her charge were brilliantly rendered in Sarah Helm’s nonfiction account, “A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of World War Two,” but here Jenoff chooses a gauzier, more florid and awkwardly romantic account.
Atkins is morphed into Eleanor Trigg, assistant to the director of the SOE, who is charged with putting together a crack team of women capable of doing all sorts of nefarious deeds, from blowing up bridges to simply operating radios behind enemy lines. When Jenoff puts together Trigg’s team, Magnificent Seven-style, the book is compelling. Jenoff deftly describes the training of the young women in Trigg’s charge, most notably Marie, who seems uniquely unqualified. “She couldn’t set an explosives charge without her fingers shaking, was hopeless at grappling and shooting. Perhaps most worryingly, she could not lie and maintain a cover story … Her one strength was French which had been better than everyone else’s before she arrived.”
And in fact, this is one of the novel’s chief problems: Marie doesn’t have
Jenoff has at her disposal a story of heroism and espionage ... but the result has all the tension of a Hallmark card.
much to do, since all she’s good at is speaking French without an accent. She’s stationed in a small town in the French countryside and told to report on the movements of the Germans in town, which she presumably does, but it all happens off of the page. She begins to fall in love with another spy, the taciturn Julian, code name Vesper. If there’s an emotional connection between the two of them, it happens in the author’s imagination.
Julian is all brooding proclamations and rough hands, and their relationship is made out of little more than fleeting looks: “Her eyes met his and held as they had on the train. But it was daylight now, their feeling unmasked and out of the shadows …” which serves as the extent of their physical relationship until a laughably horrific torture scene. Few men can be shot “between the temple and the cheekbone” and still profess love in near Shakespearean sonnet, but apparently Julian is one.
But Jenoff ’s most curious misstep involves a narrator named Grace, who starts the novel off when she stumbles upon a suitcase belonging to Eleanor Trigg in 1946, at Grand Central Station in New York. She rifles through it and finds photos of the women taken during their training and decides – for no reason and with no discernible consequence – to search out the truth behind who Trigg and the women are … or were.
Grace’s inexplicable turn not only is unneeded, it also strains all credibility when she’s able to piece together topsecret post-War information with the alacrity of, well, a trained spy. But for what? It’s never made clear and this is where “The Lost Girls of Paris” is most disappointing: Jenoff has at her disposal a great, mostly untold story of heroism and espionage, both about the woman who trained an elite force of operatives and then spent years looking for them after their death, and also about what it was like to be one of those women, but the result has all of the tension of a Hallmark card. This is a slight re-telling of a remarkable story and an unusual slip-up from the dependable Jenoff.