Book of the Week
Bad faith.
A war biography.
Bad Faith: A Story of Family and Fatherland
By Carmen Callil
Synopsis: “…epic, elegiac, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study of powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance.”
Given high praise by eminent historian Antony Beevor, Carmen Callil’s book is an astounding piece of biographical research, which tells a threefold story. It is primarily the biography of French First World War veteran Louis Darquier, a man who assumed the baronial title ‘de Pellepoix’ and lived with his Australian ‘wife’ Myrtle in a perpetual state of debt and flight from creditors. Darquier became a notorious French anti-Semite who was made Commissioner for Jewish Affairs during the Vichy government years of World War Two and was nominally responsible for the deportation of Jews, many of them children transported alone, from France to Nazi concentration camps. It is also the story of Louis’ daughter Anne who was abandoned in England before the war by her parents and how she had to live with consequences born of discovering her parents’ part in the history of France. Her tragic story weaves in and out of that of her parents’ lives and ultimately the life of the author herself. It is also a wonderfully rich description of the circumstances in France leading not only to the latent acceptance of public anti-Semitism but also to the Vichy state itself which governed France in collaboration with the Nazi occupiers from July 1940 to August 1944.
This book has a creeping power to convey not only the bare facts of history in a concise and dare I say ‘entertaining’ way, but also the complex and warring emotions of disgust married to sympathy, for both the protagonists and the un-named who lived through the events. Of the 20 or so works on various historical topics I have read so far this year, this stands head and shoulders above them and thoroughly deserves the praise it has received since its publication. I recommend this to anyone, not solely those interested in the history of the Second World War.
Jaime Ward
Library Assistant.
15 October 2007
