THE COLLABORATORS

Hill takes time out from his notable series featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe for a longish (448 pp.) tale—first published in Britain in 1987, and very much in the mode of his WW I chronicle No Man's Land—of moral and political compromise, despair, and unexpected love in occupied France. The densely plotted story centers on Gunter Mai, a sympathetic lieutenant in the occupying German army who is obliged to canvass Paris for possible collaborators, and on Janine Simonian, a young woman who is obliged to enlist officially as an informant to the Abwehr in exchange for news about her wounded husband Jean-Paul. When JeanPaul returns to his family, partly amnesiac and transfixed by hatred of the Germans, Janine, drawing away from him, becomes gradually more dependent on Mai; and when her mother-in-law and two children are rounded up in a pogrom, she offers herself to Mai again. Even though she has no secrets to betray and he does not want to use her, they make a second bargain, preventing the children (though not their grandmother) from being shipped to Auschwitz. In the meantime, Jean-Paul has become one of the most flamboyant members of the Resistance; and when Janine and Mai make a third bargain (the children have been seized again, this time in Toulouse), her bogus information coincides with a tip having fatal consequences for Jean-Paul and his colleagues. Hill's account of Janine's collaboration is grimly ironic: she never intentionally gives Mai any information; he is unable to restore any of her loved ones and after the liberation reverses political sympathies; she is branded her husband's betrayer by the very citizens who had been collaborating more fully themselves. A moving, richly textured account of an inhuman military occupation and the all-too-human loyalties it spawns. In Hill's view of war, there can only be losers.