Chris is a man in classic midlife crisis. His marriage is loveless, and his salesman job more or less meaningless. At least that's the picture the reader is presented with at the opening of A Partisan's' Daughter. When Chris meets Roza, a woman he mistakes for a prostitute, he falls into a kind of obsession that sees him returning again and again to listen to stories from her past that she uses to keep him coming back. It’s an odd kind of almost virtual love affair predicated on repression and sustained desire that you might find amongst Internet couples. But this is London in the early 1970s, and there’s no Internet to speak of. Chris is already ‘passed it’ as far as his hip daughter is concerned, and his participation in Roza’s crazy narrative is as voyeur only.
The story is written in alternating first person narratives between Chris and Roza, each in the role of memoirist, recounting this brief dalliance in a larger life. One chapter oddly breaks into alternating paragraphs between the two characters, with playwright-styled headings for each, much like the “Circe” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. It sits uncomfortably in the midst of what is otherwise presented as a seamless narrative, but perhaps, like finding Roza researching her own supposed history in the library, it’s another signal that all is not what it seems. de Bernières puts the reader in the role of Chris, a hapless visitor lacking either the tools to determine where the truth lies or the ability to move forward. The relationship between truth and fiction remains a nebulous one, especially set against the historical context out of Roza’s past, and the confronting childhood she reveals in such a nonchalant way to Chris. On top of this is her shifting accent, and her "admission" that she gets pleasure out of shocking him.
Roza's stories are a mixture of touchingly mundane -- the stuff of all childhoods -- and deliberately sordid, showing off de Bernières talent for describing torture. Real or imagined, the stories draw the reader in. Although A Partisan's Daughter is built around the ennui of both key characters, there is no sense of drag. Instead, the plot is driven forward by the increasing parallels between these two characters – their stories so different but their impulses identical:
I didn’t need any money and I’d never tried getting it from streetwalking. Perhaps I was bored. I used to get bored with myself sometimes. I’d get this feeling that I ought to be running down mountains and singing, like in The Sound of Music, waving my arms about and being joyful, and instead I’d realise that I was sitting in front of a quiz show in a condemned building, smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee that made me feel bitter in my mouth. It wasn’t my ideal life. So I’d get an impulse to do something to put the flavours back on my tongue (12)Certainly there is something a little icky about Chris’ confessions to the reader, and about Roza’s desire to keep Chris wanting her while also frightening him. It’s a game of truth or dare that the reader is unwittingly drawn into, and that tension keeps things moving.
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