Jonathan Raban explains how to live in a city

move on over to sector B and create a second dramatic crisis which is also abruptly left unresolved. And so on with the remaining sectors C and maybe D. Then back to A. After several full repetitions of the basic pattern, produce your satisfying finale. The sectors of action are now brought together in a convincing unity. The composition is complete. But all is not well. The whole thing is old stuff. Some readers may be confused, annoyed, or—worse yet— bored as they are thrown from one place to another just as a climax approaches. Especially in the field of history, this kind of pattern produces questionable results. People who read history take it for granted that any subject matter will have its divisions. But they want these divisions to appeal to human intelligence, not to the urge for melodrama. They do not, for example, tolerate an author who takes them to the start of Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg and who then breaks off for quite a while in order to describe the state of rising excitement far away in the White House.

One author who is not scared off by any of these considerations is Robert S. Thompson. His study of Fighting France in World War II contains at least three important sectors of action and several auxiliary ones as well. There is a constant hop, skip, and jump from one to another throughout the book. Sector A is a region of northern France where the resistance is involved in elaborate espionage work during May and June 1942. Sector B is a fort on the Libyan front being defended by the Free French at almost the same time. Sector C is the headquarters of Charles de Gaulle in London. In fact, sector C is the whole career of de Gaulle. In sector A there is a melodrama which moves along like the old, serialized, Saturday- matinee version of The Lone Ranger. Two heroes emerge, Gilbert Renault and René Duchez. After many narrow escapes they manage to send off to England plans showing all the German fortifications along the northern coast of France. Obviously something of value. Thompson claims that in 1947 Omar Bradley acknowledged that the Anglo-Americans selected their landing beaches in Normandy with this intelligence in mind. But if there is any truth in this claim, it is a truth that has been vouchsafed only to a very small band of believers. The official British and American histories of the war do not mention the Renault-Duchez episode. Nor is there reference to it in the memoirs of the great soldiers involved, viz., Montgomery, Brooke, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Bradley himself.

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move on over to sector B and create a second dramatic crisis which is also abruptly left unresolved. And so on with the remaining sectors C and maybe D. Then back to A. After several full repetitions of the basic pattern, produce your satisfying finale. The sectors of action are now brought together in a convincing unity. The composition is complete. But all is not well. The whole thing is old stuff. Some readers may be confused, annoyed, or—worse yet— bored as they are thrown from one place to another just as a climax approaches. Especially in the field of history, this kind of pattern produces questionable results. People who read history take it for granted that any subject matter will have its divisions. But they want these divisions to appeal to human intelligence, not to the urge for melodrama. They do not, for example, tolerate an author who takes them to the start of Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg and who then breaks off for quite a while in order to describe the state of rising excitement far away in the White House.

One author who is not scared off by any of these considerations is Robert S. Thompson. His study of Fighting France in World War II contains at least three important sectors of action and several auxiliary ones as well. There is a constant hop, skip, and jump from one to another throughout the book. Sector A is a region of northern France where the resistance is involved in elaborate espionage work during May and June 1942. Sector B is a fort on the Libyan front being defended by the Free French at almost the same time. Sector C is the headquarters of Charles de Gaulle in London. In fact, sector C is the whole career of de Gaulle. In sector A there is a melodrama which moves along like the old, serialized, Saturday- matinee version of The Lone Ranger. Two heroes emerge, Gilbert Renault and René Duchez. After many narrow escapes they manage to send off to England plans showing all the German fortifications along the northern coast of France. Obviously something of value. Thompson claims that in 1947 Omar Bradley acknowledged that the Anglo-Americans selected their landing beaches in Normandy with this intelligence in mind. But if there is any truth in this claim, it is a truth that has been vouchsafed only to a very small band of believers. The official British and American histories of the war do not mention the Renault-Duchez episode. Nor is there reference to it in the memoirs of the great soldiers involved, viz., Montgomery, Brooke, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Bradley himself.