As a reader, I have largely ignored the historical fiction genre. The War Begins in Paris (2023), by Theodore Wheeler, shows me that I have been remiss. Through it, I’ve learned that at its best, the genre turns a mirror toward the reader and subtly pushes us to see history repeating itself. And it can show us how to act. With deft and clever prose, our narrator shows us how any ordinary person can end up overwhelmed and under the spell of those whom history would paint clearly as the bad guys.
The book, which follows two women journalists in Western Europe during World War II, is funny, surprising and soft — and the characters are easy to love, despite their obvious flaws. But it’s not the sort of poorly researched, soft-edged book that sanitizes the Holocaust for the sake of a nice story like so many hot sellers.
In the prologue we are introduced to the main characters — and the narrator (third-person omniscient) immediately uses humor to make it clear that the Nazi is not the woman we will sympathize with.
“Jane loved the church. All its pompous glory … Much the same as she loved the pomposity of Fascists and their claims to empire,” Wheeler writes. “That kind of ambition was addictive to some — aspiring to rule the world as the Romans did, as Charlemagne did, to make themselves a link in the chain of history. Not to say the Church and the Fascistas were the same thing, but in Spain that decade, in Jane’s heart, they were close enough.”
I needed this where it came, in the opening of the story, because I had not yet properly interpreted the book’s epigraph (from journalist Martha Gellhorn): “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was.”
It took a large portion of the narrative coming into shape for me to see that, while Jane is an addictive energy, she is really the vehicle through which we learn the insidiousness of fascist ideology. It is through the other woman, usually called Mielle, that we navigate the relationship to the war, homeland (Mielle’s is a Mennonite enclave in Iowa) and belonging. Mielle never sways toward Nazism. But she is entranced by Jane, her former professional hero, and by that woman’s lifestyle at a time when Mielle feels isolated.
The War Begins In Paris possesses the hypnotic combination of meticulous research and readable, comfortable, beautiful prose. So often, writers of period fiction pull their punches to entice a few more readers, only to do a disservice to both history and their own writing. Wheeler sacrifices nothing, steadily growing his plot toward its own ends.
There are moments in which Mielle’s life in 1938 holds an uncanny similarity to my own today: watching friends grow steadily into strangers as ideologies morph, seeing anger fed by injustice transform into bigotry as an ugly matter of course. There are striking insights into how trauma changes us and one sad, perfect quote about the life of a writer, “I will never understand you journalists. What good does it do to make enemies all the time? And then to sign your name at the top! How terrible.”
This book is necessary at this moment in time. And it’s an important work to hold close for those of us looking for hope to find us on the flip side of worry.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2024 issue.
