Tyres

Adam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist, and acclaimed translator. Thorpe was born in Paris but grew up between Cameroon, India, and England, as his father worked for Pan-Am and was constantly moving. He graduated from Oxford Magdalen College in 1979, where he spent a few years founding and touring with a small theatre company before settling down in London to teach literature and drama. He married Joanna Wistreich—also an English teacher—in 1985. Thorpe has been a prolific and celebrated writer since 1988, publishing eleven novels, seven books of poetry, and two collections of short stories. His first and most celebrated novel, Ulverton, received massive acclaim upon its release and received the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 1992. In addition to his novels, short fiction, and poetry, Thorpe has also translated two of the great 19th-century French novels—Madame Bovary and Thérèse Raquin—for Vintage Classics. He lives in France with his wife and three children.

“Tyres” takes place in France during the early 1940s and spans the escalating stages of Nazi occupation. Between 1940 and 1942, the political center of the French state was in Vichy, which nominally kept its “independence” through collaboration with the Nazis after the harsh terms of the armistice with Germany in 1940. Initially, the Nazis occupied half of the country while the famous WWI general Philippe Pétain led the remaining independent French state, ruling from the city of Vichy. The Vichy regime was highly authoritarian and collaborated with the Nazis in the rounding up of French Jewish people to be sent to concentration camps, as well as the conscription of their own citizens for forced labor in Germany under the Service du travail obligatoire, which André protects Raoul from through his deal with the Germans early in the story. “Petit Ours” is a fictional figure, but he is representative of the various heroic maquisard guerillas who spearheaded the French resistance in rural areas.

Thorpe’s writing aligns with contemporary notions of historical fiction, realism, and modernism. His emphasis on ordinary people and complex interiority—even in the context of greater historical events—resembles that of Alice Munro in her collection of short stories Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which dwells explicitly in the intricacies and emotions of the regular and the mundane. “Tyres” specifically joins a larger lineage of short fiction about World War II, including Roald Dahl’s “Beware of the Dog,” which is also set in Vichy France—though Dahl’s is a story of a downed fighter pilot who is tricked by the Nazis. While quite different in tone and subject matter, Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 shares a variety of thematic parallels with “Tyres.” While the former is satirical and follows members of the US air force during WWII, both examine the psychological effects of wartime trauma, as well as the many impossible choices that come along with war, and they are ultimately both tragedies. Atonement, by Ian McEwan, a contemporary of Thorpe’s, is a metafictional work of historical fiction that also holds strong thematic resonance with “Tyres.” Guilt, mistakes, wartime trauma, and retelling all feature heavily in the makeup of the novel; both stories are arrestingly intimate in their narrators’ experiences of remorse and grief.