The protestations of two
people who claim not to know their own motives frame the opening of A
Partisan's Daughter,
a novel whose tidiness becomes a provocation. During a winter in the late '70s,
Chris, a married solicitor who dismissively refers to his wife as "The Great
White Loaf," heads for a dodgy area of London to find a prostitute, just to say
he's seen one. At the same time, Roza, a bored Yugoslavian, decides to get
dressed "cheap" and lurk in the streets for fun. Roza's glee in correcting her
solicitor's mistake when he pulls over fails to explain the exact nature of the
thrills she sought, or why she tells him how much she allegedly used to charge
for the service he claims not to be seeking.
The discrepancy set up
right away by this gap propels A Partisan's Daughter, which gracefully
frustrates a resolution to this meet-ugly. Backing away from an image of
himself as a john, Chris offers Roza a ride home and becomes the captive
audience to a series of continent-spanning tales of her upbringing and journey
to London. True, her father is a disappointed Communist and Tito supporter,
which itself makes her exotic to him. But her background isn't just a point of
reference for Chris, it's a conduit through which they both slip into a strange
codependency. And the few chapters she narrates indicate that she's smarter and
less helpless than he'd like to see her—a narrative shading that throws
her entire account into question.
The author of Corelli's
Mandolin
is almost unrecognizable in this slim volume devoid of the plump prose with
which de Bernières upholstered his wartime romance. Chris and Roza, left to
their own plain speaking, attain a timelessness: When he describes his first
encounter with her, it comes out in the clearly self-contradictory "You can
call it love, if that's what suits. I think that's what I would call it."
Ultimately, Roza's stories, regardless of their accuracy, captivate Chris, who
struggles with whether he wants to save her or sleep with her. The emphasis on
how out of touch he is with her modern world becomes unnecessary: His
fascination with Roza and the consequences of his ambivalence, regardless of
his declared ardor, can neither fully redeem nor destroy him.