Book review: The Order Of The Day, By Éric Vuillard

Any book festival directors looking for well-suited literary double acts could do a lot worse than pair the French authors Éric Vuillard and Adrien Bosc and invite them to discuss the fictionalisation of historical events. Bosc’s 2014 debut, Constellation, was an ingenious retelling of a 1949 air disaster in which an Air France plane, a Lockheed Constellation flying from Paris to New York, crashed into a mountain in the Azores, killing all 48 passengers and crew. It is, he has claimed, “unequivocally a novel”, yet at the same time as historically accurate as he was able to make it. Constellation, then, is as much an act of imaginative editing as it is an act of imaginative writing, and it will be interesting to see if Bosc has taken the same approach in his latest book, Capitaine, about the 1941 voyage of the refugee ship Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, from Marseille to Martinique.