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5.0 out of 5 stars
Readable, moving account of a British flyer & the resistance, Dec 1 2003
I had previously enjoyed several other books by Anita Shreve, but
somehow had missed RESISTANCE . . . so when I recently found
myself in Florida without a book to read (having finished the one
I brought down on the plane), I was pleased to find this novel at
my folks' home.It is the readable account of a British flyer shot down over the Belgian
village of Delahaut . . . he somehow manages to survive the
crash . . . when a brave 10-year old finds him, he is hidden first
in the boy's farm and then in the home of a resistance fighter. An intense love affair ensues until the flyer is caught, as is the
woman hiding him . . . I thought that might happen, so it came
as no real surprise . . . yet that said, the story is almost heartbreaking
in its account of the tragedy of war. Also, I was impressed by Shreve's research into the topic . . . she
presents a feel for the era that made me feel as if I was actually living
through it. There were several memorable passages; among them:
Ted listened t the chatter, scanned the skies. The fighting he knew,
could sometimes be a thing of such beauty it took your breath away.
The graceful arc of a fighter that had put its armored back to you, even
as it glided down and away, out of sight, out of range. The flashbulb
pops from silver planes that came at you from the sun. The way a
B-17 seemed slowly to fall to earth with great dignity, as though it
had been inadvertently let go by God. The odd inkblots against the
blue, floating curiosities twenty feet wide and filled with exploding
steel. Long white contrails in formation, road maps for German
fighters. A plane, severed at the waist, that made your heart stop.
Count the chutes. And breaking radio silence, shouting wildly at the
doomed crew to bail out, bail out. It was the worst thing you had ever
witnessed, and when it was over there was no place to put it. No
part of you that could absorb it, and so you learned to transform the event even as it was happening, a sleight of hand, a trick of magic,
to turn a kill into a triumph. A stillness in the barn. Henri felt a throbbing in his right temple. They
all knew what Léon meant. In the cities, where the Maquis was
better organized and had more funds, more access to materiel, each
Resistance fighter was given a single tablet of cyanide. To contain
the damage in the event of torture. Few men or women, no matter
how brave, could withstand the prolonged and creative torture
of the Gestapo-he'd heard it all-the electric prods and needles
to the testicles, the gouging of the eyes. Without the cyanide,
every man was a traitor. And when she was not working or they were not reading or talking
or listening to the radio or performing the tasks necessary for their
survival, they made love. It pleased him how often they made love,
and sometimes it frightened him. It was as though they both knew
that what they had could not last. When he touched her, she never
demurred, never pulled away from him. She seemed to have the
same need as he, a need he did not now think of as physical, or
purely physical. He thought of it rather as the desire to be known--the
desire to know and to be known by the one person. Sometimes
he was truly baffled that the one person should be a Belgian woman
who was married to another man, a man critical to his own
survival-and yet at other times he made himself believe that their
loving was fated, as the fall of the plane itself may have been fated.
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