RELATIVE VALUES Erica Wagner delves into a compelling tale of war and family
A retired professor and his great-nephew uncover their family’s wartime secrets in Emma Donoghue’s latest novel
Emma Donoghue is perhaps most famous for her 2010 novel Room, written in the voice of five-year-old Jack, who is being held captive along with his mother. Its blend of the horrifying and the quotidian, showing how children seek normality in any circumstances, made it a bestseller. Room was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2015 adapted into a film starring Brie Larson.
But to focus on a single book is to miss the range of Donoghue’s achievements. As she points out when we speak on the phone – I’m in London, England, and she’s in London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner Chris and their two children, Finn and Una – she has been writing full-time since she was 19. Her first novel, Stir-Fry, set in contemporary Dublin, appeared in 1994, followed by Hood in 1995. In 2000, Slammerkin – inspired by an 18thcentury murder on the Welsh Borders – saw her move into historical narrative, a genre at which she has become adept. Since then, there have been short stories, books for young readers, screenplays and scholarly titles (she has a PhD in literature from Cambridge University).
Yet Donoghue laughs when I express wonder at the variety of her accomplishments. ‘I think it’s a kind of restlessness,’ she says. ‘If I were to set three novels in the same time and place, I’d get bored; my prose would flag. I’m stimulating my imagination, I suppose.’
Her latest tale, Akin, is set in the present day but delves into the dark aftermath of World War II. Noah, a New York-based scientist on the cusp of his 80th birthday, is preparing to travel to the South of France, where he was born as the war was breaking out. Sent to America to escape the conflict as a child, he is now embarking on his first trip back to his birthplace. But just as he is about to set off, he finds himself made the temporary guardian of his 11-year-old great-nephew Michael. Neither of them is happy with this arrangement, and both struggle to come to terms with their situation. Meanwhile, Noah is busy trying to discover whether his mother was involved with the French Resistance – or was in fact working for France’s Nazi occupiers and the Vichy regime that supported them.
The book has its origins in the two years Donoghue spent living with her family in Nice. ‘I love places that are steeped in history,’ she says. ‘Nice is surreal because it is so pleasure-filled – you are basking in sunshine, you are covered in icing sugar as you eat a pastry – but you look up and there’s a plaque commemorating men who were hanged by the Nazis on that very pillar.’ She began to look into the history of the Resistance, and was both fascinated and perturbed by what she found. ‘In France, people talk as if the movement was something everyone took part in,’ she says. ‘But there’s very little about how the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans. At one point, they were offering the Nazis more Jews than they had been asked for. One study said that maybe two per cent of the population had any involvement in the Resistance.’
The investigation of this bleak history is leavened by the comedy and pathos of the growing – and unlikely – connection between Noah and Michael. Interestingly, Michael began, for Donoghue, purely as a literary device: something to put an obstacle in Noah’s path. But, she says, real sentiment can come from the most technical motives. ‘They can end up being emotionally the heart of the story – cold-blooded decisions can lead to very warm-blooded moments.’ The result is a delicate and moving reminder of the way in which our human stories are made from such practical choices – often in life as well as literature.
‘Akin’ by Emma Donoghue (£16.99, Picador) is published on 3 October.