It's not to diminish the significance of the art Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore made together in and around between-the-world-wars Paris - work receiving renewed attention of late - to say that none of it is absorbing as Rupert Thomson's masterful novel about them, "Never Anyone But You" (Other Press). The women, lovers since their teens in the French provincial town of Nantes, largely collaborated on their art, Cahun better known for her photography and visuals, and Moore for her writing.
But I predict that it's the two women who step off the pages of Thomson's searching novel who will do more than any art expo to revive interest in them. The consistent narrative voice is Moore's, rendered with the alchemy only fiction can concoct. Through her, Thomson takes us deep into the inner lives of these externally daring, internally complex but temperamentally and temporally love-locked women. I can't imagine either minding that Thomson's novel is as much his imagination as their story.
Thomson conducts his narrative sorcery right out in the open, lending both history and mystery shape and meaning. Only the opening chapter, in 1940, is out of linear sequence in this otherwise traditionally structured tale, but seldom does an author drop you into the true middle of the story as expertly.
It's bombs that drop, from Nazi warplanes, into the sea off the Channel Island of Jersey while Moore is swimming. Here's her adumbration of a war that will separate and nearly kill her and her lover, whom she then rushes to join in their seaside shanty without toweling off: "Like everybody on the island, I had been dreading this moment. Now it had come. There were several planes, and they were flying high up, as if wary of anti-aircraft fire.... A wave caught me and I went under. The ocean seemed to shudder. When I came up again, a column of smoke was rising, treacle-black, above the headland to the east." That's in the first paragraph, this novel's perfect germ.
The war - during which the women were imprisoned, in non-adjoining cells, for resisting, artfully and all on their own, the German occupation - is the setting for the core of this story. I'm not sure the reader even needs to know the preceding historical facts, but they are these.
As Lucie Schwob, with Jewish parents and grandparents on her father's side, Claude-to-be met the slightly older Suzanne Malherbe. I haven't been as moved by the story of sexual awakening among young women since the extraordinary (also "historical") French film "Summertime." Then - and this really happened, in Nantes - Lucie's divorced father married Suzanne's widowed mother, and they became stepsisters, their guise and, as needed, disguise for the rest of their lives together.
Transplanted into the Paris of the surrealists and other bohemians, they mixed and worked alongside Dali, Miro and Hemingway, a scene that played out for them before it played itself out. That's the basis of their reputations now - or until now - but like most such fictionalized depictions of a period, the wild Paris interlude becomes a page-turner in the wrong sense, though there's no saying Thomson didn't intend that.
Still, it's there that Lucie donned men's clothes to become Claude Cahun, and Suzanne followed suit and became Marcel Moore. That's what didn't change when they left the depleting Paris demimonde and moved to Jersey, to The Farm with No Name.
What might be the big events in another author's novel - their trenchant but almost private-joke resistance, their long incarceration and improbable liberation - bow to the women's inner lives. Moore is the anchor in Claude's labile, volatile capers, on her best days hypochondriac, routinely suicidal and practicing what her Lacanian successors of the 1970s and 80s would call "psychic mobility."
Claude's physical disappearances for days at a time are less challenging for Moore than her episodic psychosexual bonding with others - she the more gender-fluid of the two - including men who make phantom-like appearances in her post-gender cyclone. It's when they are imprisoned in cells far from one another that the reader most feels the emotional force field - more recombinant molecular motion than mundane earthly magnetism - that both binds and frees them.
Thomson employs no writerly tricks beyond channeling a story that wants out. The pact - imposed by Claude on Moore, who's already emotionally there - is that she, Claude, must die first, what with being, in the end, nothing without her sister.
The Parisian Claude who declares, "No one has anyone" - introducing a harrowing paragraph it would be desultory to call explanatory of her psychology - doesn't so much mature as ripen, then wither. It's Moore, solitary in the years after Lucie's death, who has the last word. "'You were everything to me,' I say out loud, 'whether you liked it or not. There was never anyone but you.'"