The Girl at the Lion d'Or -

Sebastian Faulks

Vintage

1990

249 páginas

8h 18m

ISBN-10: 0099774909

Set in provincial France in 1936, Faulks’s second novel established his reputation and set out the themes that he would deal with for the next ten years.

Anne Louvet arrives to work at the run-down hotel of the title, in Janvilliers, a small coastal town in Brittany. It is clear that she brings with her the secret of a traumatic past. Almost at once, she becomes fascinated by a local lawyer, Hartmann, who lives in a large and semi-derelict house on a headland with his wife Christine.
The novel deals with the growing love between Anne and Hartmann, the moral difficulties it poses to each and the way in which the private lives of individuals are affected by public events. Hartmann, who was a young intelligence officer in the First World War, has lived a full life in Paris before his marriage, which has turned out to be loveless. Anne has been brought up by a guardian after a scandal when she was a child, involving her father and the French army mutinies of 1917.

The political life of France in the 1930’s, as it descends towards the shame of Vichy, provides the background against which the deeper colours of the past are gradually painted in. Hartmann and Anne both feel themselves to be victims of events whose repetition they are powerless to prevent.

It was the depth of characterisation and the depiction of Anne’s emotional life, her passion for Hartmann and her determination to shake off the weight of the past, that resonated most powerfully with readers, many of whom still claim it is their favourite of all Faulks’s novels.