Passing Unseen

Passing Unseen is a melange of several stories. Taken as a whole they represent an element referenced in the quotation from Robert Pirsig’s seminal book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, part of which is the title of the book. Several of the stories are based on actual events; the crash of a US bomber in 1944 and the rescue of the crew by groups of the French Resistance; the part they played working at a Resistance Field Operating Hospital as it was driven higher into the alps by the German Mountain troops; the PoW camp operated by the Resistance at which collaborators and others who’d committed treason were held; the remarkable dash by units of the US 7^th Army who relieved Grenoble seven days after landing in Provence when the plan was for them to arrive 90 days after the invasion; and the US and British teams parachuted into the Vercors stronghold to help organise the French Resistance – all these elements were true. I added fictional but accurate stories about the attacks by the Resistance on the railways, the torture of civilians by the Germans and their home-grown French Gestapo, the Milice, and the bravery of individual civilians and churchmen. The primary challenge was to pull all these elements together into a timeline understandable to the casual reader and not just the committed academic.

I’d already told the story of the rescued US bomber crew by the French Resistance in an interactive multimedia programme I made for the Museum of Alpe d’Huez which stands today in the locality where the action took place. During the years I had a home in the mountains I met many former members of the Resistance including the doctor who led the hospital and a resistant who'd privately published a book about the incident. Through him, I was put in touch with the surviving members of the crew who told me a somewhat different though no less exciting version of the tale. They also told me of two other American groups that were operating clandestinely in the area. I translated the book and also discovered an earlier account of the narrative that had been published in the American edition of Readers Digest. 

It wasn't all plain sailing. I was frustrated by the intransigence of the official French archivists who did nothing to help my research and indeed on occasion blatantly lied about facts I knew to be true. For example, the official French history is that the Germans were driven out of France at the end of WW2 by French forces – that’s the French forces who capitulated in 1940 –  and that no other allied forces were involved. 

The challenge I had was to slot all the elements into a logical timeline so that the reader could understand the way that disparate groups acting in different places and on different schemes all melded into a cohesive force working against the Germans. Frankly, it didn't work and always tended to revert to a diary format unsuited to a novel.

Ironically, I found the ultimate solution was to discard the notion of a linear timeline entirely and to treat the whole as we might have treated a complex multimedia AV programme in the past. I realised that the events were living examples of the phenomenon Robert Pirsig describes, specifically the transient interactions we each have with others every day. It was clear that to make the book capture the essence of Pirsig's random 'selection' it could not be a linear, time-lined history and so I told the story through the lives of key characters and, very occasionally, the groups in which they were operating. 

By this time many of the real-life characters and many more of their descendants were aware of the book and I came under pressure, mostly helpful but very occasionally critical, intent on ensuring that I didn't misrepresent the characters in which they were interested. I'd already added other related but imaginary strands and decided to fictionalise the entire story. I hid the real characters in composite players with different names and back-stories and placed the key events in imaginary locations.

Because the genesis of the story had been the French account, I initially allowed my tale to end at the same point, the final meeting of the bomber crew with their French rescuers. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I was tempted to wrap up the loose ends with an 'aftermath' chapter but this time the device felt like a genuine cop-out. I decided to continue the story, much now fictional, following the lives of the main characters over the next 20 years.

Authors are probably unwise if they allow themselves 'favourites' among their work but because I believe the structure emphasises the key element of Pirsig's concept and yet even though it's not a linear story the reader is encouraged to read it linearly and not randomly. I am especially pleased with the outcome. I may also have worked the 'aftermath' device out of my writing habit. If so, all the better.