Certainly not the man in question, who with Charlotte Gray, his weak pseudo-sequel to Birdsong, will, I predict, disappoint readers here as it has done in Britain. Her roommate is Daisy, and apart from her Red Cross work, she is an even more frivolous creation than Charlotte. Daisy Forester arrived home that evening with exciting news. Terence had got them all invited to a literary party and the place would be swarming with delectable poets. At that party, Charlotte meets Peter Gregory, an RAF pilot who, we are told, has had many brushes with death.
Charlotte immediately falls head over heels in love.
Their courting is interrupted by Gregory's disappearance in France while on a mission. Charlotte, who proves to be an incompetent secretary in a doctor's office, finds her way into a job secreting messages to the French Resistance, and while in France she decides to find her new amour. The style of the writing is verbose, and the delineation of both character and plot tedious and predictable. There are no insightful sparks of illumination that someone such as William Trevor would have succeeded in discovering. Pat Barker does a much better job in her Regeneration Trilogy .