1 min read
By Virginia Baily
Virago, £14.99
Virginia Baily's second novel, Early One Morning, packs the emotional punch of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française - or so her publishers would have you believe. They exaggerate; Baily is a competent writer with an eye for pretty details and an ear for the pain and regret that can echo in the most banal of exchanges. But she's also prone to cliché and - given the context - unforgivably syrupy sentimentality.
The book opens, as its title promises, at the crack of dawn one day in 1943. Chiara Ravello is hurrying through the sleepy, battle-scared streets of Rome towards the Jewish ghetto. Word is that German soldiers have gone on the rampage, and she must help a friend burn the anti-fascist pamphlets they have stashed at his bar before they're discovered.
A few hours later, her mission complete, she finds herself witnessing the round-up of Jewish families. As they're herded on to the back of trucks, a woman catches Chiara's eye, and something passes wordlessly between them. The woman is pregnant and has three children with her, including a boy of seven whom she nudges forward. Without thinking, Chiara calls out that there's been a mistake, that her non-Jewish nephew has accidentally been taken.
Afterwards, a label stitched to his coat collar will reveal him to be Daniele Levi. The rest of his family will be murdered at Auschwitz but Chiara will keep Daniele safe through the war and afterwards. When she hears that an aunt is searching for him, she'll destroy the paperwork in order to keep him for herself.
To encourage him to deal with his loss, Chiara has him leave letters to his mother in the places she used to take him, his favourite being a statue of Anita Garibaldi astride her rearing horse. It doesn't help. The mute, traumatised child grows into a wild teen and graduates to drug addiction and petty crime before vanishing from her life altogether.
But not, it turns out, before knocking up a Welsh au pair. Now, 16 years later, Daniele's daughter arrives on Chiara's doorstep laden with questions in broken Italian. And together they track Daniele down. The somewhat preposterous closing scene involves a letter from him that they find at the statue. It's addressed to "Ma"- not the mother that Baily dispatched so briskly but to Chiara.
Early One Morning resembles Suite Française only to the extent that the Holocaust is an absent presence, a cataclysm that occurs offstage. This makes chilling sense in the context of Némirovsky's work: she was writing from the thick of it before she died at Auschwitz in 1942. Baily's decision to look away from the horrors that she nonetheless exploits is a cop-out.
Hephzibah Anderson is a freelance writer