Isotopias: Places and Spaces in French War Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries by Peter Tame (review)

Studies of war fiction in recent years have frequently focused on memory as their primary analytical lens. While memory is not absent from this study, Peter Tame adopts a rather different approach to his chosen corpus by choosing to focus on the isotopic visions of war represented by a wide range of authors and the interplay of space, place, and literary creation. The major conflicts in question are the two World Wars, although some space is also accorded to the Spanish Civil War. The corpus is wide-ranging and includes both familiar and well-studied titles, such as Roland Dorgelès's Les Croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1919), Irène Némirovsky's Suite française (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1963), and Patrick Modiano's 'Occupation Trilogy' (Paris: Gallimard, 1968, 1969, and 1972) and Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), as well as lesser-known titles and authors, including three texts by André Chamson and two by Robert Brasillach. While the monograph's title underlines the ambition of its chosen corpus, in fact the majority of the texts that form the subjects of the twenty chapters are written by authors who lived through one or more of the wars and who wrote their account either during or shortly after the conflict in question. Thus, excluding the works of those writers born after the wars (Modiano and Littell), the time-frame is a rather more constrained one of 1919 to 1960. Indeed, the only authentically twenty-first-century text is Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) since, while Némirovsky's novel was, for historical reasons, not published until 2004, it was written during and in response to the débâcle and Occupation. The book is pleasingly symmetrical and is divided into five parts, each one organized around broad chronological themes: the Great War; the Entre-deux-guerres; Invasion; Occupation; Liberation. Within each part, four chapters each take a single novel as the focus of analysis. Each part is followed by an expansive conclusion that brings further works into the discussion. Four isotopic modes are identified within the methodological framework: possession/appropriation, dispossession/loss, alienation, and repossession, with much of the analysis oriented to determining which of these is the dominant mode in any one novel or time period. Tame concludes that while it might be expected, at least in historical terms, that modes of loss and repossession dominate in fictions of war, in fact it is the mode of alienation that features most widely, suggesting that, while history 'deals in what is logical and quantifiable' (p. 518), fiction engages more readily with the complexities of the human condition of which alienation is a truer representation in wartime. With its close readings of a wide range of fictions of conflict, the monograph offers valuable insights into the imaginative and creative processes involved in their writing.