Usually I watch a film or a TV series after I’ve read the book but in this case the Netflix series was on my screen long before I realised there even was a book, written as it happens by an author I had never heard of either.
Being Netflix, the available funds for this project were obviously vast and helped make the viewing quite compulsive. Interestingly I discovered that the book had first been published as ‘The flight Portfolio’ but presumably the streaming company considered this title too obscure for their purposes, whereas ‘Transatlantic’ is blatant, quite in your face, for this is indeed the subject: getting people over The Atlantic.
We are in France, in Marseille in 1940 and the Nazis are closing in. A young east coast American journalist, with Bostonian patrician tendencies, Varian Fry, is on a mission to rescue as many artists, writers and thinkers as he can before it is too late. The vast majority of those on his list are Jewish. There are exit routes that he gradually learns of: walking through and over the Pyrenees into Spain, going by boat to Northern Africa and then onwards to the USA. He quickly builds up sympathetic and useful contacts. Inevitably his mission becomes public and he finds there are queues of ‘ordinary’ Jewish people outside his office desperate for his help. How can he choose who gets help, should he choose? Why is an artist more important than anyone else, even if one of them is Marc Chagall. At this point I was wondering how much truth was actually involved here and how much the author was enjoying colouring in.
One episode certainly had the feeling of reality and this was a party at the small chateau that Varian Fry had rented, a good drive outside Marseille. It was crazy and drunken and totally surreal. I use that last word purposely as several of those taking part we would now call surrealist artists e.g. Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. There was rough red wine, nudity, animal masks and much more. The descriptions in the film and the book were similarly vivid, debauched and hilarious.
Fry is somewhat haunted throughout his fraught, dangerous time in France, not only with the tensions involved in his mission but also with his own sexuality, meeting again his lover, Grant, from Harvard days and deciding what impact this will have with his New York marriage to Eileen.
Varian Fry was a real person and the book was written with the permission of his son. It is a long, involved story which does rather swallow the reader up. I was happy to be consumed as it was a very worthwhile read.