Realism, tenderness elevate ‘City of Women’

We are nearing the moment in history when World War II and its evils will pass out of living memory. It leaves the rest of us with a great responsibility — novelists in particular, and seen in this chill light, the sentimental fabulism of writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon comes to seem self-indulgent.

Earlier this year, their style received what felt like an important rebuke from HHhH, Laurent Binet's novel of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, which rejected dramatization and fancy in favor of a compulsive fidelity to historical realism. And by Binet's standard, it may be that — unusually — a group of crime and espionage writers working on the subject of the Second World War, such as Philip Kerr and Alan Furst, have outdone their literary counterparts. Their research has been immaculate, their delineation of moral ambiguity egoless and constant. Now, with his first novel, City of Women, David R. Gillham joins their rank.

City of Women is the story of Sigrid Schröder's war. A (fictional) stenographer in Berlin, her husband — like so many, as the book's title indicates — is off on the front lines, and she lives every day with the stale terror of English bombings, food shortages and neighborly suspicion. But a secret in her recent past, an affair with a Jewish man named Egon, indicates a greater complexity of thought than she ever betrays to the world, and when she has the opportunity to help a resistance group, we know before she does that she will take it.

This is a shopworn premise, but Gillham has two great strengths that elevate his story. The first is his hard-won command of Berlin in 1943, its geography, its restaurants and hotels, even its language. (There are German words on nearly every page, but they seem authentic, never showy.) Second, and more significantly, his characters suffer from the full moral complexity of their time. A woman and a man, of whose integrity we have been sure, betray their friends not out of evil, but because they face impossible dilemmas, what the Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer has called "choiceless choices" — while the book's villains have flashes of crabby, unexpected selflessness.

City of Women is not a propulsive book, and in literary terms it is a substantially lesser achievement than, for instance, that of Furst, whose best novels have a beautifully enigmatic suspense that seems to reflect wartime's constant uncertain fearfulness.

For all that, the author's impeccable research, realism and tenderness are important. They make fiction seem like a viable tool for reminding ourselves of history as it truly happened — and not simply as it affects us. Consider the book's hideous epigraph, from Heinrich Himmler: "Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years' time whether a Fräulein Muller or Schulze was unhappy?" The answer, Gillham proposes, is that hopefully, with vigilance, we will.

Charles Finch is the author of Burial at Sea.

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