Alex J. Craig reviews The Death of the Fronsac by Neal Ascherson

iScot Book Review

The Tontine Hotel, meeting place of officers during the war

Union Street where Szczucki lodged with the Melville family

THERE is no need to introduce Neal Ascherson, as Robbie Dinwoodie’s excellent article in last November’s iScot did just that and more. Also mentioned there was Ascherson’s recently-published novel The Death of the Fronsac. The book links the two countries which mean most to the author, Scotland and Poland, and is told mostly from the point of view of a Polish officer, Maurycy Szczucki (pronounce it ‘sh-choot-ski’). Szczucki is a scion of minor aristocracy in the East of Poland, who has fled his homeland after trying to resist the simultaneous German and Russian invasion of 1939. Having reached Paris, he is sent to Greenock to be a liaison officer with the French Navy.

The story begins one morning in the spring of 1940 when a French destroyer, moored in the Clyde off Greenock, is suddenly destroyed by a mysterious explosion, with the loss of many lives. What follows entangles Szczucki’s life for ever with the Melville family, in whose house on Union Street he is lodging. Decisions made then, for reasons he hardly understands, complicate his life for the rest of the war, and the years thereafter. But chance events, like the ankle injury sustained through putting his foot through the rotten floor of a stately home while dancing a reel, also intervene to divert his course or frustrate his expectations. Life never goes to plan, but he has good friends as well as a ghost who haunts him.