Reading Roundup: Searching Through France and Texas
Jeffrey Hunter as Mart and John Wayne as Ethan in the 1956 film adaptation of The Searchers. (Ethan is called Amos in the novel.)
A young girl or woman has gone missing, and two people team up on a quest to find her and, hopefully, bring her back. The two searchers are rather an odd pair: the naive younger one is motivated by love and guilt; the grizzled older one seems motivated mostly by revenge. But it turns out that both of them are scarred by years of war and loss, they’re just handling it in different ways. Maybe, as their quest continues, they can reach some sort of understanding. And maybe, just maybe, they will find the missing girl, or at least find some answers.
This describes two novels that my book club read this year: The Searchers by Alan Le May and The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. I know, it seems odd to pair them in a blog post: The Searchers is a classic of Western fiction, a genre that skews dude-heavy; while The Alice Network is the first book that pops up in the Google widget when I search for “women’s historical fiction.” But, as I said, they really do employ some similar plot and character aspects. Moreover, they were both a lot more willing to delve into the effects of war and trauma than I thought they would be. I think sometimes I can have the snobby assumption that “commercial fiction” is fundamentally unserious, but these books both prove me wrong.
The Searchers by Alan LeMay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The thing I appreciated most about The Searchers is its willingness to go there. By which I mean: it frankly acknowledges the bleakness of its situation and the impossibility of a happy ending. Even if Mart and Amos succeed in their years-long search—even if they miraculously find Debbie, their relative who was kidnapped by the Comanche at the age of ten—they won’t be able to just go back to normal. The years apart, and their built-up traumas, will have broken all of them. This strikes me as emotionally honest, authentic to the situation (the novel is inspired by the true story of a woman named Cynthia Ann Parker, which is even bleaker than fiction). But it feels unexpected in a 1950s pulp novel that was made into the most acclaimed Western film of all time. We Americans love happy endings and simplified good-versus-evil, cowboys-versus-Indians stories, so I had feared that this novel would be just a vaguely racist piece of Manifest Destiny propaganda. I am glad to say that it’s more complex than that.
I mean, there are still some vaguely racist descriptions, though perhaps they make sense because the novel is mostly told in third-person limited from Mart’s perspective. (As I wrote about Mr. Midshipman Hornblower earlier this year: I don’t mind it when characters have racist prejudices that are typical for their place and time, but I do mind it when it feels like the author shares those prejudices.) And at other times, Alan Le May shows a more sophisticated understanding of the world than his characters do. I love when he points out their hypocrisy: Mart and Amos look down on Mexicans who make their living trading with the Comanche… but they’ve been trading with the Comanche too, to try to get information about Debbie. The novel is also very smart about Mart’s PTSD (his own parents were killed by the Comanche when he was a young child), even though it is written and set long before PTSD became a psychological diagnosis. Mart’s longing for home and family even though he technically has no home left, his desire to see his quest through to the end versus his desire to give up and settle down with his best gal Laurie, is skillfully done and makes him easy to empathize with as the point-of-view character, though I gather that the movie focuses more on the vengeance-seeking Amos character.
(And yes, if you haven’t figured it out by now, I read the book without having seen the movie. A Goodreads review of The Searchers that spends more time talking about the novel than about John Wayne? Who ever heard of such a thing?)
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Alice Network takes my favorite approach for historical fiction: real events and real-life people make an appearance, but the POV characters are entirely fictitious. So you learn some amazing facts about history, but the author also has the freedom to shape an exciting narrative and delve into character psychology in a way that isn’t strictly limited by the truth. There really was a WWI spy network in northern France led by a woman code-named Alice, and the Germans did indeed commit many atrocities during their occupations of France in both the 1910s and the 1940s. But we meet “Alice” and learn about this history via two invented heroines: Eve, a stammering file clerk turned WWI secret agent, and Charlie, an American college student seeking the truth about what happened to her beloved cousin in WWII.
A lot of the top reviews of this book on Goodreads complain about the latter storyline and, okay, Charlie’s story about driving around France in 1947 looking for news of her cousin was never going to be as exciting or high-stakes as Eve’s story about working undercover in occupied Lille in 1915, literally sleeping with the enemy. Still, I didn’t hate the Charlie chapters—I just found them a bit perfunctory at times. More often, though, I was impressed by Kate Quinn’s command of pacing and narrative—the book is nearly 500 pages long but it flew by, each chapter filling in some of the gaps in Eve’s past while also raising new questions that keep you reading.
There are some formulaic (if entertaining) elements here, like Charlie’s romance with a rugged Scotsman who’s good with his hands. Still, the novel is admirably willing to engage with the all-encompassing trauma of war and the toll it exacted on women like Eve and “Alice.” (Not to mention the toll exacted on France when Germany invaded it twice in 25 years!) In some ways, working as a spy allows Eve to find her true strength and exercise talents no one ever thought she had; in other ways, it breaks her almost beyond repair. The scene where Eve is drugged and tortured is probably the best writing in the book, a sort of Art Nouveau fever dream.
On a lighter note, I’m impressed that this is a commercially minded book by an American author that takes place everywhere in France but Paris. Americans have such a tendency to romanticize Paris and forget that the rest of France exists, so it’s really refreshing to come across a novel that stops only briefly on the outskirts of Paris, and spends most of its time in Lille, Limoges, and Grasse!