The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, St. Martin’s Press 2015
As one of Kristin Hannah’s supporting characters confesses to her novel’s heroine that “Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories,” this one is heartbreakingly, albeit beautifully, so.
The heroine we fall in love with is Hannah’s young Frenchwoman Isabelle Rossignol, who proves so audacious and cunning with beauty to match, that she could be an heir apparent to Rebecca Sharp herself. While both leading ladies carry an indomitable will, the former illuminates the page with the purity of her convictions.
When Nazi Germany steamrolls into France to impose its will during the second World War, Isabelle’s iron defiance will endure anything to resist and undermine. This anything involves the looming threat of imprisonment and death, as she cloaks her identity under the pseudonym “The Nightingale.” With this guise, she generates shock and awe through the Nazi ranks as the elusive French resistor establishing an intricate network of safe houses and escape routes to aid downed Allied airmen escape Nazi-occupied France. Thus, she’s transfigured from an inconsiderable daughter of a Paris bookseller, to an epitome for French opposition.
Apposed to Isabelle’s narrative is that of her elder sister Vianne and her daughter Sophie, left behind when the men of France answered the summons of war. From an initial failure to accept the full ramifications of the war, a series of harrowing atrocities against Vianne and those she loves induces her to become a reluctant heroine herself. The two sisters’ stories eclipse each other as the war continues, as they traverse the perils of a country desolated by the ensuing pain. Each page leads them into darker actualities of that pain.
This story gains power like a wave racing towards the shore through a storm. We can foresee the resolution drawing near, but still shudder when it arrives and overwhelms. While the historical fiction genre may be saturated in the World War II era, a heartbreaking tale delivered by superior writing will stand luminous. The Nightingale deserves a place on the shelf next to Anthony Doerr’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light we Cannot See. Hannah grants a depth to emotions and a richness to the language seldom found in a novel.