The Book Guy

By any standards, Suzanne Malherbe and Lucie Schwob were exceptional individuals. Better known by their gender-neutral artistic names Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, the pair met as teens at the turn of the last century in the French city of Nantes. They were immediately and resolutely besotted, and when Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father, their status as step-siblings provided a convenient cover for their blossoming romance.

In Paris of the 1920s the pair became involved in the founding of the surrealist movement, although they struggled to gain recognition for their own work, both then and throughout their lifetimes. Cahun became a writer and prolific photographer and was known for their striking, androgynous self-portraits, while Moore was better known as a graphic illustrator.

In 1937, fearing the increase of anti-Semitism on mainland Europe, they bought a house and set up home in Jersey. The island did not provide them with the safety they had hoped for, and the opening scene of Rupert Thomson’s fictionalised account of Cahun and Moore’s life together takes place in 1940 with the Nazi invasion of the island. The pair started a campaign of anti-Nazi propaganda which continued until they were eventually caught, tried and sentenced to death in 1944. Jersey was liberated in 1945 and they were free to return to their ransacked home.

This should all make for an utterly engrossing page-turner. However, Thomson has delivered an uneven novel that too often becomes bogged down in dull exposition. It does pick up in the later chapters when the pair wage their propaganda war, and Thomson movingly portrays their unshakeable bond in the face of the most extreme adversity and betrayal.

Ultimately, however, can’t help but feel that Moore and Cahun would have been much better served by a strong narrative non-fiction account of their life together, a book which Thomson clearly would have had the knowledge, interest and skill to deliver. A missed opportunity on the page for me then, but there is definitely a fascinating biography (and lm) waiting to be produced about these formidable trailblazers.

Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

(Corsair)

If you like this, you might also like…

The Night Watch

by Sarah Waters

(Virago)

Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger hits screens at the end of August, so no better time to revisit 2006’s The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and subsequently adapted for BBC2. Initially set in the aftermath of World War II, the story moves backwards and forewards in time and focuses on the lives of three gay women: Kay and lovers Helen and Julia. The novel marked a step-change for Waters, and it remains one of her most interesting books.

The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

(Virago)

Set during World War II, Mary Renault’s tale of a post-Dunkirk love triangle has rightly become a gay classic. Recovering at a veterans’ home, young corporal Laurie Odell must choose between the romantic love he feels for Andrew, a conscientious objector and orderly, and Ralph, a sexually experienced Naval officer who was the object of Laurie’s school boy aff ections when they attended the same school. It has inevitably dated, but its release some ten years before decriminalisation in the UK played a part in highlighting the heroic role gay men played, in the society of the time.