The pear arrives anonymously, in a cardboard parcel left with the concierge after dark, alongside three small cheeses, a loaf and a note thanking the family for taking in a Jewish girl. They do not eat it. They put it in the middle of the table on one of the good plates and wait for guests. The next afternoon a widowed radio operator brings her small son, who has never tasted a pear, and the grandfather cuts it into six exactly equal slices with the care of a surgeon. Everyone bites at once. The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris is full of scenes like this, and the novel is best when it trusts them to do the arguing.
What the Piano Teacher of Montparnasse Is Really About
The family belongs to Andrée Levallois, a music teacher in the fifteenth arrondissement, and to her parents, who run a little bookshop on the same square. In November 1942 an eleven-year-old pupil, Josie, appears at their door after her mother and brother are taken, and they keep her. The novel spans the next three years, and its real subject is not espionage but the long, tiring, improvised business of hiding a child in a city that is starving and full of eyes.
Morris is particularly good on those eyes. A customer in the bookshop, Mme Charbonnier, lingers over a purchase to remark that there are hardly any Jews left in the neighbourhood and that this should make life quieter. The daughter of that customer is at Josie’s school. The headmistress, a real woman named Marie-Thérèse Évrard, answers Andrée’s request by silently pushing an enrolment form across her desk, and the child’s papers are re-dated to her first day as a Levallois. Every neighbour in The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris is a question: will this one help, report, or look away?
The neighbour who matters most says the least. Maurice Dupont, the concierge, sits at a small desk just inside his door and sees every Thursday visitor, every suitcase and every new niece who climbs the stairs. For most of the novel he asks nothing, and much of the tension in The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris comes down to a single look from him across the tiled lobby. Morris turns his silence into a form of courage, which is her most original idea about occupation: that choosing not to see could be the bravest thing a man in his position had to offer.
The most interesting answer comes from an unexpected direction. Sent to the countryside for a summer week, Josie is drawn into a church camp by a kind, well-meaning neighbour who wants to save her soul. Morris treats it with a moral seriousness many wartime novels skip: affection can erase a child too. Andrée’s furious response is one of the few times the book’s anger feels earned rather than announced.
The Jewish calendar is handled with similar tenderness. The family’s first Hanukkah is spent at the radio operator’s flat, where Josie, who had refused to light candles since her father died, says the blessing in halting Hebrew and later picks out the tune of an old hymn of deliverance on the piano at home. It is the emotional peak of the first act of The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris.
A Resistance Built on Code Names
Around the household runs the work of the cell, and the threat to it sharpens in early 1943, when the occupiers let the Milice, a French paramilitary force, loose in Paris. The enemy now speaks the same language and knows the same streets. Here the novel splits in two. Some of it is quietly believable. The radio operator, whose Jewish husband vanished in 1940, is offered weapons training by London and has to decide whether a pistol under her floorboards is worth the danger to her son. The grandfather and an elderly doctor travel to Saint-Nazaire to sketch the rebuilt U-boat pens, sheltered by a salty, fearless nun who runs couriers in wimples. These are people doing small, frightening jobs.
Other passages read like a different genre. When the dashing aristocrat known as Cat is sent to spy on the Château de Pignerolle, a German communications centre in the Loire, he bluffs a patrol in perfect German, knocks out a militiaman, grabs secret files, flees over barbed wire and wades down a stream to lose the dogs. It is fun, but it belongs to a film the rest of The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris is not making, in a story otherwise built on queues, ration coupons and the weight of a shopping bag, and it gives Cat more plot than personality. His flirtation with Andrée is left hanging.
The larger difficulty is the voice. Morris writes in a present-tense close third that hops between heads, sometimes within a scene, and in the later chapters long stretches of the war are summarised rather than dramatised, as if the book were in a hurry to reach its ending. The characters also have a habit of explaining what the moment means. After a scene has made its point, someone usually makes it again, aloud, in case the reader missed it. Readers should know before they start that The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris includes torture, executions, deportation and starvation, along with a child’s grief, though most of the violence happens just off the page.
How Much of Montparnasse Heather Morris Invented
Heather Morris has built a large readership by turning real people’s lives into accessible novels, and she has been criticised for it; historians took issue with the accuracy of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and the Auschwitz Memorial was among its critics. This book is more careful. A long author’s note separates what is documented from what is imagined: the concierge, Maurice, who becomes the book’s quiet hero, is invented, the restaurant where intelligence changes hands is fictional, and Cat is only loosely modelled on a real officer. Readers who finish The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris should read that note, because it changes how the novel lands.
It also tells the best part of the true story. The real Andrée became a music teacher with methods of her own after the war and wrote a book on teaching music through song. The real Josie emigrated to the United States, and Andrée gave her the piano as a wedding present; it crossed the Atlantic with her and still belongs to the family.
What It Leaves Behind
There is a better novel inside this one, leaner and more willing to leave things unsaid, but the book that exists has a warmth that is hard to dismiss. The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris is a fine book club choice precisely because its weaknesses are easy to argue about and its central bond is easy to love.
Readers who want occupied France with more steel should try The Mademoiselle Alliance by Natasha Lester, built on the real woman who led one of the largest intelligence networks of the war, or Skylark by Paula McLain, which finds its own underground in the same city in 1942. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay remains the novel to read about the children of the 1942 roundups.
Long after the spies blur together, what stays is a pear on a plate, and six people eating it at the same moment so that no one has to watch the others.