AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF
by Tara Ison
A Jewish girl comes of age in Vichy France, relentlessly deformed by the spiritual rot of her era.
"My name is Marie-Jeanne Chantier, and I am twelve years old. My parents named me for the Blessed Virgin, and also for Saint Jeanne d’Arc, the young girl who had short hair and saved France from hostile foreign invaders a long time ago....Maman and Papa died last year in a tragic car accident outside Paris, bringing toys to poor orphans at the convent. Now I live here in the country in La Perrine, with tante Berthe, tonton Claude, and cousin Luc, who were very kind to take me in with good Christian charity and give me such a wonderful home." So says a "stupid assignment" written for school by a clever Parisian preteen actually named Danielle Marton. In fact, Danielle's Jewish mother has smuggled her to the countryside to masquerade as the niece of former family servants while she herself faces the jaws of the wolf—which have already snapped shut on her husband, Danielle's beloved Papa. Though in many obvious ways this third novel is a departure from Ison's previous work, including Ball (2015), a collection of contemporary gothic horror stories, on closer examination this is a horror story: The newly minted Marie-Jeanne seems to cathect the evil around her until she has completely forgotten who she is, what she cares about, whom she loves. Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character's moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: "To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.” Most abhorrent are the trajectories of Marie-Jeanne's friendship with her peers—Genevieve, another Jewish girl in hiding, and her "cousin" Luc, who undergoes a transformation diametrically opposed to hers.
Free of sentiment but not without hope of redemption, this is a suspenseful and chilling story.