Le Navigateur

by Jules Roy

Histoire d'un navigateur français à bord d'un bombardier durant la 2e guerre mondiale en Angleterre

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Jules Roy was a French writer.Roy, born an Algerian pied noir (Algerian settler of French descent) and sent to a Roman Catholic seminary, used his experiences in the French colony and during his service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War as inspiration for a number of his works. He began writing in 1946, while still serving in the military, and continued to publish fiction and historical works after his resignation in 1953 in protest of the First Indochina War. He was an outspoken critic of French colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and later civil war, as well as a strongly religious man.

Reviews

[Andrewcharles420 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A French navigator flying with an RAF bombing unit in WWII has to bail out of his plane after a successful mission, after his plane collides with another in the group. He is the only survivor of the two planes. He lands in a beet field and walks to the farmhouse, largely uninjured. He wakes a young lady whose husband is an intelligence officer at another military base. The navigator is picked up by a jeep and taken back to his base, where he has to slowly reintegrate into life there. He is reprimanded for refusing to fly with a known bad pilot, starts an affair with the farm wife, and then volunteers to fly with a pilot whose nerves are affecting his eyesight. The navigator's friend, 'The Admiral' (a captain), also features.

I'm not sure how to judge this book--its message and its intended audience are different than those of books I normally read. The book was not uplifting, and spoke some to the brutal realities of war. The author was also very disparaging to the nice woman who helped the navigator recuperate (and became his mistress)--it was noted how plain she was, and that her only laudable feature was her youth; that in ten years her skin will sag and her eyes would lose their sparkle. She knew French in the English countryside... perhaps she was added for the French readers?

I was hoping for more detail on the normal life of wartime bomber flight groups... but perhaps this book was too short to support such hopes (it only took a couple hours to read). That this is a translation from its original French, and stars a french navigator I would have liked to see more about the differences between French/RAF/US/etc bomber/flight groups--in my mind this translation would have been for WWII flight survivors, though I don't know how well they might appreciate it. This book wasn't bad, but I can't recommend it, there must be more notable books on WWII.

[Bernard Pauwels · Rating 3 out of 5]

De beschrijving hoe de piloten de bombardementen beleefd hebben is erg overtuigend. Als document de moeite waard, als roman niet zo bijzonder (een beetje typisch existentialistisch gedoe over lot, plicht, zin en onzin...