The French connection

If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one.

If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. What you’d expect, picking up Lisa Hilton’s The House with Blue Shutters and seeing, on the front, a nondescript young woman contemplating a blue-shuttered house, is romantic fiction. Historical, claims the blurb. Indeed there’s both romance and history here in a novel that moves between German-occupied France of 1939 and today’s France of second homes and holiday gites. But overall it’s food and sex (sales-team pressure?) that dominate and detract from both romance and history.

Lisa Hilton has written three historical biographies (The Real Queen of France, Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure and Queens Consort); this is her first novel. It’s perhaps unsurprising that of the two stories she attempts to weave together, the historical one — which tells of a village’s involvement in the Resistance and of the love affair between Oriane, a farmer’s daughter, and Karl, a German officer — is by far the stronger. The contemporary story concerns Claudia, a beautiful art lecturer, who after a series of ‘London loves . . . men unremembered and unmourned after ten years of bed-hopping’, finds herself pregnant by Sebastien, who doesn’t love her, and resolves to marry Alex, who does. Off they go to France, where Alex’s brother, Jonathan, and wife, Aisling, run La Maison Bleue as a guest house.

Somehow the two stories refuse to gel. Hilton tries to establish an intuitive rapport between the young Claudia and the old Oriane, as between two women who have loved unwisely.