The Girl at the Lion d'Or by Sebastian Faulks, was the author's second novel. Set in the small French fictional town of Janvilliers, Brittany, in 1936. Together with Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, it makes up Faulks' France Trilogy. The character Charles Hartmann is common to all three books.
Plot introduction
An unsigned prologue introduces the reader to 1930s France and sets-up the fiction that the novel tells the true story behind an actual newspaper report of the time. This is imagined as being a passionate adulterous love-affair between the book's two central characters with the nation's unstable political scene as its backdrop. The politics are rendered to us through the characters' every day conversation- they rely on newspapers for information- which means that the history lesson aspect of the book arises organically in the narrative.
Written in the third person using a conventional omniscient narrator, the novel airs the internal motivations and viewpoints of various characters. The narrative tone is at times ironic; the author uses unfussy language to tell the story with economy. The vast majority of the scenes in the novel are set indoors, which gives it a domestic and claustrophobic feel. There are no descriptions of physical violence, but there is trauma and angst. The character of Mattlin is a truly vicious villain, while the mood is down-beat -- in fact, mock-Gothic in the Poe-inspired sub-plot involving the renovation of the Manor House.
The book is shot through with mordant wit, but there are also lighter moments of tenderness and near-slapstick. On its publication, The Girl at the Lion d'Or was lauded in reviews for Faulks' ability to evoke a sense of time and place and for his adroitness in creating engaging characters.
Plot summary
A wet and dark winter night sees young and beautiful Anne Louvert arrive in Janvilliers from Paris to take up a lowly position at the village inn, the Lion d'Or. She gets to know the staff- the formidable Madame Concierge, the drunken Cook, the sex-starved Porter- and to meet the mysterious Patron. Then there are the customers: the evil Mattlin and the sensitive Hartmann most prominent among them.
A generation older than she, the cultured, rich and married Charles Hartmann begins an affair with Anne. She reveals her secrets, her fears and her hopes to him trusting in their mutual love. His wife, Christine, knows him better, and in the end, its no real contest for her to keep her husband and see off her latest rival. Although Faulks writes the love story with commitment, the nature of the novel determines that it can only end badly for Anne. An historical novel in which history is treated seriously, The Girl at the Lion d'Or is tragic drama and its real subject is France herself. A happy fairy-tale ending would be incongruous: it did not happen for the French Third Republic; therefore, it could not happen for Anne.
Anne's childhood has been blighted by the First World War. Her father was shot on a charge of mutiny while serving in the trenches at Verdun, and her mother, harassed and victimised because of his fate, driven to suicide. Anne endured a wandering, hand-to-mouth existence with her uncle Louvert, whose name she adopts.
Louvert, vainglorious and empty dispenser of fine sounding phrases- "Courage is the only thing that counts"-, joined a right wing revolutionary organisation with the aim of "making France great again" but deserted both Anne and France for a new life in America. Anne later invests her emotions in Hartmann and although devastated by his rejection, she does not allow it to destroy her. She intuitively turns away from suicide and the last line of the novel leads us to believe that she will, though there will be dark days ahead, overcome her situation. The battle of Verdun and the French army mutinies a year later were momentous events for the French nation. That the battle and a charge of mutiny played such a major part in Anne's personal history suggests a metaphorical link between her and France. The fact that the prologue to the narrative dedicates the story to Anne, "an unknown girl" rather than the "important public" figures of the time also indicates that the character represents something larger than an individual. The use of the adjective "unknown", in the context of this novel, is loaded with meaning, as it evokes the Unknown Soldier.