The Forger of Marseille - Linda Joy Myers

The Forger of Marseille: A Novel by Linda Joy Myers

        My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

The power of “fiction” is its believability. Linda Joy Myers’ The Forger of Marseille: A Novel does a very good job of stepping from her previous genre of memoir into historical fiction. At the Berkeley Books Inc., Myers outlined her four years of travel and research --interviews, tours, memoirs, stories, true life accounts; how she pursued “info trees,” “research rapture” delving into “the tome of history” to produce a blending of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi demonizing of race, politics and religion in Germany, Austria and Poland reaching into France from 1938 Berlin to the Marseille of 1940-41. With her key characters so positioned and swept along; she’s created believable SS, Vichy government agent and Americans’, artists’ and resistance collaborators’ efforts, failures and successes.

I would have liked a little more detail of the main characters’ and places appearances in order to place and picture them adequately throughout the book; particularly as their names change with their passports as they travel from here to there. Not all of us have been to Le Boulevard Saint-Germain, or even remember exactly what it looks like even if we have. Get lyrical, if not poetic! You can do it, and it might even be fun.

And, quite honestly, the lack of contraceptive use by the lovers is a major plot blunder in this day and age and then. It stopped me in my tracks. They could not have had that much intercourse and still produced all those forged papers and midnight passports over two years without quite a few “French letters” in between, n’est-ce pas? 

Young, somewhat healthy, persistent? A hot lover with medical background? C’mon. Naive young woman and lusty young man or not, at least he “ought to know better,” as well as Myers, because the power of “fiction” is its believability. I’ll forgive Myers for this because it’s her first novel, but it makes her heroine just a tiny bit false.

Her “stateless” citizens and refugees in prisons, interrogations, internment camps and under aerial bombings are not that far from the Ukraine, U. S. borders and Middle East of today. Or the Vietnam, Iraq and Irans of our lifetimes.

I love one of her main themes: 

“never, never forget the power of art.” 

– très bien, merci!
 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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