Ignorance by Michèle Roberts

Published by Bloomsbury USA on January 22, 2013 

Ignorance tells the story of Jeanne Nérin and Marie-Angèle Baudry before, during, and after Germany's occupation of France during World War II. Marie-Angèle is the daughter of a devout Catholic, a middle class grocer in a small village. Jeanne is the daughter of a Jewish washerwoman who converted to Catholicism in 1920, the year of her engagement.

When her widowed mother enters the hospital, nuns take on nine-year-old Jeanne as a charity boarder in the convent. Jeanne is joined by her friend Marie-Angèle. Two formative experiences in her early teens shape Jeanne's understanding of womanhood. While Marie-Angèle looks on, Jeanne is required to expose herself to a priest who uses the sight to achieve sexual gratification. That experience provides her with context when she visits a Jewish man known to the Village as the Hermit, a collector of pornography whose wife was murdered in a pogrom. The Hermit draws pictures of Jeanne, sometimes dressed in his wife's clothes, sometimes nude.

Most of the novel focuses on later events in the lives of the two girls. By the time the war comes, they have left the convent. Jeanne begins a relationship with a Frenchman and eventually gives birth to a daughter she names Andrée. Marie-Angèle's parents do business with a black market supplier named Maurice who eventually seduces, impregnates, and marries Marie-Angèle. At the same time, Maurice is visiting a bordello in a neighboring village where he runs into Jeanne, who is working as a cleaning woman.

Michèle Roberts offers a nuanced portrayal of French families struggling with the hardships of war. As a coping strategy, they try to forget that the war surrounds them, that their country is occupied. They conveniently regard the resistance as communist controlled and want nothing to do with it while adopting a wary "live and let live" attitude toward their German occupiers. On the other hand, they often reveal their anti-Semitic attitudes in their harsh judgments of Jeanne and the Hermit while choosing to live in ignorance of Nazi atrocities.

The two girls are rich, complex characters. Marie-Angèle is convinced that her family belongs to a better class than Jeanne's family and has decidedly mixed feelings about Jeanne. As does everyone else, she assumes Jeanne became a whore when she moved into the bordello. Marie-Angèle helps Jeanne give birth to her child but is unwilling to renew their childhood friendship. During the celebration of Liberation, when Jeanne is marched down the street with women who serviced German soldiers, her head shaved bald to mark her "betrayal of France," Marie-Angèle feels a mixture of compassion and loathing for her former friend. Feeling repentant, she feels she is doing Jeanne a favor by arranging her transportation to London, where no one will know her, and by forcing her to give up her child for adoption.

Maurice is a more enigmatic figure. He shows one face to Marie-Angèle, another to Jeanne. Whether he is supports or opposes the occupation is never certain, although it seems clear that he is entirely motivated by self-interest. He smuggles Jews out of France but only if they have money. He helps Jeanne's mother but there is a price to pay.

Roberts has a keen eye for detail and a pitch-perfect ear for descriptive prose. Here she describes the women in the bordello: "Decked in skimpy pastel crêpe de Chine slips, arms and legs bare, feet swinging high-heeled satin mules, eyelashes brushed black, mouths transformed into sharp red bows, they waited to be bought." Captivating descriptions of scents and textures season the story.

Two sections of the novel are less satisfying than the rest. One concerns Andrée as she is raised by nuns who unjustly belittle her as the illegitimate child of a whore. The other is told from the point of view of a nun named Dolly who, until that point, has been a rather unsympathetic background character. Both stories are too abbreviated to add significant depth to the novel. The final chapter, taking the reader to London with Dolly, is also abbreviated but it provides, if not exactly closure, a fitting end to the story.

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