London, 1939. Ada Vaughan, 18, is willfully oblivious to war. Instead, she dreams of establishing the House of Vaughan, a place where her dressmaking talents will attract clients appreciative of all things modiste. If never explicitly defined, we’re to understand this term represents everything Ada’s life is not: quiet, sophisticated, moneyed. When Stanislaus von Lieben, an “Austro-Hungarian Count”, proffers an umbrella on a rainy night, Ada is foolish enough to think her dreams have come true.
Author Mary Chamberlain is an emeritus history professor with six nonfiction works under her belt. The Dressmaker’s War is her first novel. In the acknowledgements, Chamberlain thanks both her writer’s group and the Master’s program where she earned a creative writing degree. Indeed, The Dressmaker’s War reflects an academic approach to novel structure, with careful attention to setting, action, and plot. Every detail is attended to: should a handkerchief fall on page 24, readers can count on its being picked up by page 224.
A meticulous approach, however, does not a novel make. Amid a cast of shallow, one-note characters, Ada lacks all credibility. As she swoons over Stanislaus, Chamberlain urgently signals readers that the man is a liar, his title invented, his employment shadowy to nonexistent. Yet when Stanislaus proposes a romantic Parisian getaway, Ada joyfully, ridiculously, accepts.
The idea of a romantic Parisian weekend as the world edges toward war is shaky enough. When half the romantic couple is an unmarried, unchaperoned teenaged girl, the premise truly strains reader credulity. Even as Ada makes stealthy travel preparations, her terrified parents are packing her younger siblings off to the English countryside, hoping they’ll be safer.
At Charing Cross station Ada has a brief moment of sanity: “This was daft. She shouldn’t go. She hardly knew him.”
When Stanislaus appears, shouldering through panicked crowds, Ada’s practicality evaporates. Surely, she thinks, a marriage proposition is in the offing.
An engaging main character can carry off the wildest premise. In Yann Martel’s Man Booker Award-winning Life of Pi, readers are asked to believe a man named Pi is trapped on a rickety lifeboat, towing a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller uses the repressed, raging Barbara to tell of a fellow teacher’s affair with an underaged student. It is Barbara’s snide voice that makes her colleague Sheba’s downfall so unforgettable. In memoirs like Traveling Mercies and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott wins readers with her needy vulnerability and subversive, self-deprecating humor–even while discussing the potentially divisive topic of born-again Christianity.
Chamberlain is not so deft. As The Dressmaker’s War unfolds, readers find themselves irritated by a protagonist whose bad decisions are boundless. The Paris getaway rapidly sours when Hitler invades Poland, revealing Stanislaus as an impoverished fraud. Instead of dumping him and returning to London, Ada finds work as a seamstress, lodgings, and within weeks is speaking French. If Stanislaus has grown abrupt and unkind, she is to blame:
“She’d have to make more of an effort, make herself more alluring. A new lipstick, if she could afford it. She looked young for her age, she knew. Her cheeks still had the plumpness of youth. She’d try and look older, more mature. Perhaps that’s what Stanislaus wanted, an older woman, an experienced woman.”
That Ada is stuck in wartime France doesn’t penetrate until the night a bloodied Stanislaus shoves her into a car, angrily speeding toward Belgium. There he abandons Ada in a bomb shelter. Does Ada become angry? Finally wonder who this jerk really is? Nope. She searches the streets for her beloved, German bombs raining around her.
Captured by Germans interested in her dressmaking skills, Ada is sent to an officer’s home just inside Dachau’s gates. Locked inside a small room, she is forced to sew gowns the wives of high-ranking Nazis. Starved, beaten, cold, Ada remains oblivious to the identities of her fellow prisoners. Nor does she ever figure out why the camp chimneys belch such noxious smoke.
“The man in the striped jacket was no longer there. He’d left in the spring, and there was another who took his place, a middle-aged man whose skin hung in swags on his frame. He must have been a big man once, well fed.”
Chamberlain deserves credit for her writing skills: The Dressmaker’s War zips along quickly, with events piling up at a pace very nearly outrunning the ludicrous plot.
Chamberlain is at her best when discussing Ada’s dressmaking, clothing, and fabric. Rayon moiré is “unhappy”, linen is “cross”. Silk’s moodiness requires decisive action: “you had to be firm with silk.” Designing an evening gown for a Nazi client:
“Roses would be too fussy with a fantail skirt, would spoil the line, the simplicity that Ava had in mind. Roses would be a disaster. But a single rose, a large one, a corsage, center left, just below the neckline, that would be class.” (Italics author’s)
At the war’s end Ada returns to London, rapidly finding work and housing. Still hoping to establish House of Vaughan but needing extra cash, she turns to the world’s oldest profession. Apart from the occasional nightmare, a war that left millions of survivors permanently scarred has done little to Ada.
At this juncture, The Dressmaker’s War loses any possibility of redemption. Now 25 years old, Ada has learned nothing. Nor has she matured. The war might never have happened, for Ada picks up where she left, falling in with Gino (the real life pimp Eugene Messina) and, most improbably, becoming involved with Stanislaus again. A subplot about a lost infant is poorly realized, and again, highly unrealistic.
In the afterword, Chamberlain paints Ada as an exploited woman whose chances in a sexist society were few. While I’ve no doubt women of Ada’s era endured appalling sexism, Ada’s particular plight has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with foolish decisions. It could even be argued that Ada’s dressmaking skills increased her chances for a better life.
It’s unfortunate that The Dressmaker’s Wife is such a troubled novel, for Chamberlain is an able writer. This leaves readers every reason to believe better is to come.