“Pardonable Lies” - Jacqueline Winspear
🇫🇷 This novel has Maisie returning to France for the first time since her service during WWI, and forces her own reckoning with the grief she has carried with her since her time nursing near the front lines. Maisie notes the rebuilding and a slow return to normalcy. For the reader, it’s tough to imagine the same countryside would soon be plunged into war again.
WWII looms in the debates swirling among Maisie’s peers about Hitler’s intentions (whether he poses a real threat to peace or merely represents a regime suited to pulling Germany out of the post-WWI slump). The theme of economic woes and political instability has replaced the heady enthusiasm following the end of WWI.
🇫🇷 Maisie is tasked with obtaining details surrounding the death of British aviator Ralph Lawton, as well as gaining information about one of her friend Priscilla Evernden’s brothers who saw action in the same village in France.
🇫🇷 Winspear continues the theme of unpacking Great War trauma. This time, her focus is on families coping with MIA relatives and the lack of closure, survivor’s guilt, and the nature of truth.
She also picks up another interesting by-product of WWI: a shortage of men during the war pulled many women into the workforce, post-war the women are shunted off in favor of returned men. To cope with economic woes, there is a spike in female seers and occultists preying on relatives desperate for information about their loved ones.
🇫🇷 This novel was dark and moody, emphasizing the paranormal. The focus on Maisie’s nightmares shows us starkly that veterans didn’t just return home and leave the battlefield behind them. The psychic wounds lingered. Maisie has to push past her own comfort zone (bottling up her grief), take a risk, comfort the very battleground where she served and lost, and ultimately make changes to her present life.
Maisie has been running on adrenaline since her mother died and she entered Lady Compton’s employment. She toiled as a maid, then as a student, a wartime nurse, an apprentice to Blance, and now as a business owner. In between, she has loved and lost and witnessed unspeakable horror. All her grief catches up to her in this book.
🇫🇷 I had a bit of trouble understanding the rupture between Maisie and Blanche. Surely for someone of Maisie’s intellect and preference for rational thought, the fact that her mentor was a clandestine services big wig was not a shock. Therefore, her anger that he withheld information from her seems odd. Why would she think her mentor was an open book?
🇫🇷 I like Winspear’s interest in yogic philosophy and her attempts to incorporate aspects (i.e. mindfulness, meditation) into Maisie’s training. However, I’ve noted a few points that I wish Winspear had altered.
Basil Khan is Maisie’s spiritual guru. He is a Ceylonese master, but his tradition is never named. It is an Eastern philosophy, perhaps a form of Buddhism. This is all great. However, when she goes to flesh out the relationship with some mundane details, I have to raise an eyebrow. Maisie’s greeting of this learned teacher with a kiss on the forehead is odd. Kneeling or bowing low before him, and perhaps joining her hands in a namaste greeting would be far more logical in my opinion. Also, it’s a quibble, I know, but if we’re going for authenticity, then Maisie would remove her shoes prior to entering his house, not just upon entry to his private rooms.
🇫🇷 As before, Winspear uses the relationship between Billy and Maisie to illustrate class divisions. This time, I found their interactions to be grating - I believe the point has been made. We understand the unique gender/economic power dynamic though their origins are equally humble. Thanks to Lady Compton’s patronage and her own intellectual gifts, Maisie has risen far beyond class limitations, yet the notion of station lingers all around her.
🇫🇷 Winspear approaches the theme of homosexuality as taboo with modern sensibility which of course is an improvement over how a true period detective fiction would treat the subject. Maisie is compassionate and strives not to reopen old wounds. She observes without judgment the tearing apart of family not by war, but social taboo.
🇫🇷 As with the earlier novels, this is well-researched historical fiction. From the villages in France, to the battlefields, to the landscape of the French countryside and smoggy London, Winspear has nailed every detail from clothing to motor cars.
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