I am about to review a World War II book in which the lesbians survive. If knowing which characters survive is a spoiler that would taint your enjoyment of a book, now would be a good time to stop reading this post. Ordinarily I would start by saying the name of the book and talking about its other qualities and eventually, with spoiler tags, I would add that the lesbians survive. But honestly, in this, the darkest timeline, the lesbians surviving is a big part of what made the book so meaningful to me, and I thought I would probably not be the only person for whom this would be true.
Good?
Good.
The book is E. R. Ramzipoor’s The Ventriloquists. Based on a true story, The Ventriloquists is about a small team of Belgian resistance fighters who embark on a scheme to make fun of the Nazis. That’s their only goal, make fun of the Nazis, make occupied Belgium laugh at the Nazis. Every one of them goes into the caper with the understanding that they will not survive. Except, in the end, some of them do. The lesbians survive.
I should stipulate that this is not the only virtue of The Ventriloquists — far from it. Right before I started reading The Ventriloquists, I was having a conversation with my mum about how I don’t like historical fiction. “It’s so samey,” I said. “I’m tired of reading about Nazis,” she said. “Not all historical fiction is about Nazis,” I said. “OH ISN’T IT?” said my mum, which I had to admit was a compelling counterargument. Then I came home and started reading a book that wasn’t just historical fiction but historical fiction about (resisting) Nazis, and that was the fall (in love) before which pride goeth. Ramzipoor has a wonderful narrative voice, and I was captivated by the story nearly from the first page.
The Ventriloquists is the story of a team of resisters who are tapped (by Nazis) to make a fake version of a Resistance propaganda newspaper that secretly is designed to sap the energy and will of the Resistance. But the resisters, led by the vivid and energetic Marc Aubrion, decide to do a propaganda mission of their own. They will make a spoof version of the Belgian collaborator newspaper Le Soir, which pokes fun at the Nazis, at Hitler, and the whole German propaganda machine. They have nineteen days to do it. At the end of those nineteen days, their newspaper will come out and they will all, presumably, be sent to prison camps and/or killed. Some of the caper crew are figures from real life, like Aubrion. Others, like the queer brothel madam Lada Tarkovich, are Ramzipoor’s inventions.
One of Ramzipoor’s projects in this book is to write queer heroes back into a history that works so hard to erase and deny queerness. The Ventriloquists is very centrally a story about queer resistance, which is another reason I have emphasized the fact that THE LESBIANS SURVIVE. When it becomes apparent that a particular judge, a woman called Andree Grandjean, can help the endeavor, Aubrion urges Lada to go seduce that judge. He says that if she gets Grandjean on their side, then something good will have come from her being queer. But she tells him, sternly, that her queerness is already good; and the book backs her on it. The lie is the bad thing. When Lada decides to seduce Grandjean anyway, and something good comes of it, the good outcome is queer joy, and the bad cause it sprang from was Lada’s intent to deceive — the exact inverse, in other words, of what Aubrion perceived to be valuable / shameful.
(Lada Tarkovich, by the way, is fucking terrific. If I hadn’t loved the tone and writing of this book, which I did, I would have stayed anyway, for Lada Tarkovich. In many ways, Aubrion is the star of this book — vivid, visionary, odd, kind, imaginative — but Lada is the type of character I would die for. She hides her idealism imperfectly, under prickles and pragmatism.)
On the other side of things is a gay Jewish forger, David Spiegelman, who has been forced into service for the Nazis on pain of meeting the same fate as the rest of his family. He works for August Wolff, a Gestapo officer who is responsible for, among other things, overseeing book burnings. Though he has hitherto been a good servant to the Nazi occupiers, Spiegelman secretly casts his lot in with Aubrion and the others, finally discovering a way to use his talents for mimicry in the cause of good rather than evil. He’s serious, and afraid, and angry, and he is trying to find some way — in a world that tells him over and over again that he’s unimportant — to matter.
The Ventriloquists is the story of one of my favorite types of heroism, small compared to the scope of the evil it faces, but shot through with grandeur in its belief that humans can survive and keep fighting, no matter how dark the times. It’s a story about outcasts and queer nerds who act to the utmost of their courage, intelligence, and resource to beat back the darkness for their fellow Belgians. And the lesbians survive.