The Nightingale
By Kristin Hannah
Published by St. Martin's and distributed by Macmillan
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Rating: Three
Stars (out of five)
I have Thoughts on this book or, perhaps more relevant,
Feelings. I finished it a while ago (before Life
After Life) and haven’t posted yet because I wanted to make sure I was
expressing my Thoughts in a fair and level-headed way. To be honest, I rolled my eyes a lot when I was reading this, and I
simply don’t get the acclaim. Obviously,
many people loved The Nightingale; it
has 4.8 stars on Amazon and 4.53 stars on Goodreads. I, however, felt like the story had tons of potential, but most that potential went
unrealized.
If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably seen mention of
this book elsewhere (it’s everywhere). Maybe you’ve even read it. You probably don’t need me to summarize it,
in any case, but I’ll do so briefly anyway.
The Nightingale tells the
story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, living in France during World War
II. Vianne’s husband is away at war and,
after a brief and disappointing love affair, Isabelle runs away to join the
French Resistance. As the Nazis take
over France (the book is set in the Occupied Zone), Vianne must figure out how
to make a life for herself and her daughter in an occupied town and an occupied
house, while Isabelle risks her life to save, among others, downed pilots. Vianne and Isabelle’s relationship has never
been easy, and war reinforces both their differences and their bonds.
The positive reviews tell us that this book transcends
romance and is instead a deep and complicated story about the bond between
sisters. The few negative reviews out
there tend to focus on the romantic elements and to claim they took over the
story. Here’s what I think: the book wants to be a deep and complicated story
about sisterhood and how blood is thicker than water, etc. There is a romance plot involving Isabelle,
and that’s fine. I don’t think a romance
plot, or even a focus on romance, inherently makes the plot “unserious.” I do think that the relationship between the
sisters is underdeveloped. We’re told that they don’t get along with each
other or with their father because of events that happened in the backstory,
but frankly, I found the degree of animosity, and the degree of indifference
their father exhibits, to be way out
of proportion with what we’re told (not
shown). The major themes of the book rely on buy-in
to the backstory, and I wasn’t convinced.
I was also really, really irked by the ending of the World
War II story. There’s a parallel but not
particularly developed present-ish story involving one of the sisters
travelling back to France for the first time since shortly after the war’s
end. I won’t say which, because the
story’s effectiveness relies on your not knowing for sure. The very end of the book involves that plot,
and it was fine, I guess, except insofar as it depends on the other ending. That ending
does in fact transform a story of heroism into a romance plot and, had I not
already been a bit eye-rolly and annoyed, would have ruined the book for
me. As I said, I’m fine with romance plots. You can say deep and interesting things while
telling a love story (see also: Jane Eyre,
Pride and Prejudice, and a million
other books I can’t think of right now because I’m thinking about this annoying
and overrated one). But to do that, you
have to integrate the love story into the rest of the plot, or make the love
story the focus of the plot and use it
to say the other things (love can transcend class boundaries; you have to stay
true to your own moral center in order to have a successful relationship; women
need greater economic opportunities, etc.—all of those came from the two
examples above). In The Nightingale, it felt to me like Hannah told a story of sisterhood
and survival in wartime, and then insisted that what really mattered in the end
was… True Love, embodied in a relationship we never really saw.
Here’s the thing: I really, really wanted to like this book,
and maybe that’s the problem. [Side note: this post has been brought to you by
the adverb “really.”] I like stories
about complicated relationships between sisters, and I’ve been fascinated by
the French Resistance since about, oh, fifth grade. That this book had both of those things made
it a “must read” for me, especially given all the acclaim. I had nothing but goodwill going in, and my
expectations were high. They were not
met not because the book turned out to be a romance (it really isn’t) but
because the characters were completely underdeveloped and therefore nothing
they did was convincing. And the French
Resistance felt less like a focus of the story than a backdrop for… something
else, though I’m not sure what, which might be the problem.
This has already been a very long, ranty post, so I’m going
to wrap it up. I’ll say this, though: My
academic work focused quite a bit on books that were wildly popular in their
own time and are either reviled or unknown today. A lot of these works were Sentimental novels,
focused on manipulating our feelings.
People loved them, not least because they provided an outlet for
feelings that were inappropriate to express in real life. I keep trying to fit The Nightingale into that framework. I haven’t yet figured out how, but if I do, I
might revisit this work. I have major
respect for “my” Sentimental novelists, and I might like The Nightingale a little bit better if I can make academic sense of
it, as it were.
No comments:
Post a Comment