Catherine Gavin’s 1978 novel None Dare Call it Treason is the second in her three books about the French Resistance. The first is Traitors’ Gate (1976) and the third is How Sleep the Brave (1980).
It’s 1942 and Britain’s new allies, the Americans, are landing in vast numbers to fight in Europe and North Africa. General Charles de Gaulle is a particular thorn in the planners’ sides. An abrasive character, de Gaulle is not greatly liked. De Gaulle ‘stands condemned to death by a military court for desertion – in absentia’ (p76). Roosevelt called de Gaulle ‘unreliable, uncooperative and disloyal to both our governments’ (p121). In fact, de Gaulle was kept in the dark about the North African landings – much to his embittered chagrin. ‘De Gaulle’s favourite word was Non’ (277).
A French barrister, Jacques Brunel, is running one of several networks that operate in Occupied France and Vichy France. He gets lumbered with Polly Preston, an eighteen-year-old woman, half-American, half-French who needs to get to America and reunite with what is left of her family. That in a nutshell is the plot. However, once you get past the initial chapter set in London, which is mostly exposition, you get involved in the story and the characters. Gavin’s descriptions of the people and the places put the reader in the scene.
Brunel has a response to the charges against De Gaulle: ‘If and when the Allies bring de Gaulle back to France, nobody will dare accuse him of treason. They’ll be too busy incriminating the collaborators’ (p77).
The point of view is omniscient. The main reason for this approach is that there’s a great deal of narrative relating to the real events from a historical context.
There are many descriptions that bring the scenes to life. ‘they slept until lunchtime in a brass bed with a white honeycomb spread and a red satin quilt which kept slipping down to the carpet as the little hotel shook with the passage of the trains’ (p222).
There is tension aplenty, betrayal, rivalry between different resistance cells, politics, threat, torture, death, and passion too. Gavin was a British war correspondent in France and the Netherlands and she knew the places she describes, and it shows.
The book title is from Epigrams by John Harrington (1561-1612), a two-line poem:
Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
PS
– An Army lieutenant appears, his name is Morton (p257).
