Flight into Fantasy

A couple of notes: This review contains a few spoilers, and it’s necessary for me to use some gender-neutral pronouns throughout. I’ve chosen a set that I prefer, but if you’re using a screenreader and notice the slight mispronunciation, I swear I actually mean the spellings I use.

What motivates people to acts of compassion? Why do people stand idly by while atrocities are committed? These are some of the questions that Gilles Rozier tackles in The Mercy Room. He doesn’t offer answers to any of these questions, which makes for a compelling, albeit quite dark, read that I still haven’t entirely processed.

A German teacher living in Nazi-occupied France is compelled to translate documents for the Germans. The teacher’s gender is never identified, which is a bit of a distracting storytelling device, but nonetheless an effective one. The teacher doesn’t resist hir orders, and one day, while s/he is waiting for the German officer to give hir more documents to translate, s/he stumbles across Herman, a Jewish former soldier. Compelled by his handsome looks, the teacher spirits Herman to hir home, hiding him for two years in a cellar.

The teacher is not a likeable character. Y’all know that I have to have likeable characters to root for in my fiction, but nonetheless I found hir compelling. Maybe it was just that I couldn’t believe any person with even an ounce of compassion could say or think the things that go through hir head. The teacher is obsessed with the fact that hir sister is sleeping with an SS officer. S/he has a loveless marriage which in the end results in hir spouse committing suicide, to which hir only response is along the lines of, “Wow, that was tacky.” And s/he humiliates Herman, by giving him a pair of hir underwear as well as a pair of hir spouses, so that he has to alternate between wearing men’s and women’s undergarments, and then justifies hir behavior by telling us s/he could have behaved worse.

I came away from this book with the sense that I wasn’t supposed to like these characters and that the story was really a vehicle for Rozier to explore some complex issues. The Hollocaust is a fascinating time in history, because it’s a time when people were both horrifyingly, monstrously cruel, and yet so many people showed great compassion. Yet, Rozier argues that even in compassion, people can be cruel, and it’s made me wonder about all the other stories I have read about people who helped the Jews and resisted the Nazis. What motivated them to do so? How did they react to having such absolute power over another human being? Those are chilling questions, and ones I won’t easily forget. I also appreciated the fact that Rozier delves into what it was like to be a random citizen of Nazi-occupied Europe. The motivations for the characters not doing more to resist made sense to me, and again I was left wondering what I would be willing to do if I ever found myself in such a situation. Sadly, the answer is that I don’t know.

I’m not sure how to grade this book. The writing was lovely and accessible in a way that I never seem to figure translations will be, and there were lots of exdellent ideas. But I’m not sure I’m inclined to reread it, because I don’t know if I can endure another period of time in the teacher’s head. So I think I’ll give this a B+.

P.S. I validated this for Bookshare