Fly Right

Maurer’s World War II drama follows the lives of French pilots navigating the shifting fortunes of war.

In 1940, before the United States officially enters the war, French and British pilots furiously prepare for a German invasion. French captain Cibal is the leader of eight eager but inexperienced fighter pilots, a group that would become the 3rd Squadron of Fighter Group I. He is sent to Saint Inglevert to temper the unceasingly hostile relations between French and British pilots, which have culminated in an imbroglio that left a Frenchman badly wounded and five British flyers imprisoned. While Cibal is there, the Germans attack, and later he is shot down, possibly over German territory. He meets Bernadette Goldberg, an Austrian Jew fleeing the Nazis, and helps her rechristen herself as Josette Blandine-Lagarde to make her way to safety. In this historically exacting novel, the author chronicles the travails of a massive cast of characters, including French pilots, British pilots, a German pilot, and even a German tank commander named Otto who is anxious that his troops will be overwhelmed, helpless before the “vastness before him that made him feel lost.” Maurer astutely depicts the complex shifts that occur once the French officially make peace with the Germans, a fraught arrangement in which the French are plunged into internecine conflict. He also intelligently captures a certain cynicism among some of the French, as expressed by Cibal, about the effect American participation would bring about: “Cibal wondered what would happen now that the United States had joined the war, but was sure that there would be no change in Marseille. There was still the mob, the police, the politics, the refugees, the immigrants, the locals, and the poor, all looking to make a living or to profit somehow.” This is a flawed novel—the plot is convoluted and overstuffed with digressive detours, and there are too many characters for the author to portray all of them convincingly. However, this remains a historically rigorous narrative brimming with verisimilitude and nuance.

A fascinating tour of a war fought in the skies.