“I would have liked to bind my memory fast and keep it that way,’’ Brodeck confesses, “as subdued and still as a weasel in an iron trap.’’ Denied this luxury, he agrees to compose the report but secretly vows also to write the truth. Brodeck’s truth is what we read, and it is harrowing; a layered recollection of wartime crimes, atrocities, cowardice, and betrayal.
Which war? Claudel doesn’t say. Brodeck’s mountain village could be anywhere in “the rotten belly of Europe,’’ and Claudel’s opening sentence - “I’m Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it’’ - strikes a declarative note reminiscent of a folk song or fairy tale. Nonetheless, Brodeck’s recollections of jackbooted occupiers; of being transported, along with hundreds of others, in boxcars to a labor-death camp; of torture, survival, and a homecoming to a wife driven insane and to neighbors who were collaborators at best, rapists at worst, make it brutally clear where we are. “Brodeck’’ is no myth. And the benevolent visit by the smiling stranger, who says little (“People are afraid of someone who keeps quiet,’’ Brodeck notes) cannot elevate this nightmare. By the end, we, like Brodeck, have seen too much to believe in sacrificial lambs, let alone miracles.
“My habit is silence . . . Words set on paper are dangerous.’’ This is not Brodeck, although it might be, but Louis de Bretaylles, a 15th-century French knight who appears briefly but pivotally in Emma Darwin’s engaging novel “A Secret Alchemy.’’ The War of the Roses between the Houses of York and Lancaster and the attendant murder of the princes are the central historical dramas here, and Darwin dramatizes both with a judicious blend of scholarship and poetic flourish.
