A sliding doors romance set in Nazi occupied Europe

The Herald Scotland

01-08-2025

He wakes, and saves his parents. He'll go on to suffer persecution under the Nazis and fall in love with the beautiful Sophie Strom, who he met just before the arson attack.
Life Two: Vienna, 1933. Young Max lies dreaming upstairs as Nazis torch his home because his father is Jewish.
He doesn't wake. His parents die, but he survives, disfigured by fire. He'll go on to be adopted by a Nazi family. His Jewish heritage will be hidden, and he'll be renamed Hans.
Hans will join the SS. He too will fall in love with the beautiful Sophie Strom, who he met just hours before the arson attack.
In one night, a single life branches in two directions. One path leads to life as the persecuted; the other means life as the persecutor.
Publishing execs must have popped champagne corks over the elevator pitch for The Two Loves of Sophie Strom. It's Sliding Doors in Nazi-occupied Europe. The movie is an inevitability.
Sam Taylor's novel is highly contrived, indeed so highly contrived it sometimes teeters perilously, at risk of collapsing under the weight of its own plotting. Yet it manages to maintain its balance.
There's risk injecting fantasy - this isn't quite magical realism - into a grim subject like the Second World War, but Taylor tiptoes around the bear-traps.
Infrequently, he snags his toe on a snare, as the reader is broken out of the story's flow by a scene which pushes the limits of believability, but he's never hoisted by his own design, left dangling absurdly in the air.
The book is so well written that the audience forgives the more over the top moments, and the characters are so finely drawn that you just don't want to leave them.
We never fully discover why our hero splits in two that night in Vienna: why in one world he remains the Jewish Max, and in another he becomes Nazi Hans.
Taylor is clearly saying something about the mutability of character, but exactly what is unclear. He plays tangentially with Freudian ideas around dreams - this is interwar Vienna after all - but the novel seems to hope readers just tag along without any firm explanation.
(Image: Faber)
We certainly tag along for the first three-quarters of the book. It's only in the final section, when it becomes a wartime spy novel, that the implausibility of some of the plotting starts to grate.
After the fire, young Max becomes friends with Sophie. They team up with the rebellious young Jens, another Jewish boy, and spend idyllic days in the countryside.
These middle-class kids have no idea what is waiting for them as the Anschluss with Germany approaches.
In the other world, a lonely Hans is bullied at school by the very same Jens, for his scarred face. Soon his Aryan family dispatch him into the Hitler Youth.
Not enough is ever made in the novel of Hans's secret Jewish past. Fear of discovery should stalk the page as he spends his summers at Nazi camps, but the truth feels almost forgotten.
Hans does though - like his doppelgänger Max - find friendship with Sophie. Though it's strained to breaking point by his membership of the Nazi Party.
Sophie isn't Jewish but her mother is a Bohemian painter who left her own husband because he cosied up to the Nazis.
As war arrives, Max flees to Paris, while Hans moves up the Nazi ranks, becoming Adolf Eichmann's subordinate, deporting Jews across occupied France.
Sophie has also fled to Paris, where she has married a Jewish psychoanalyst. There's those dream echoes again.
The nursery rhyme Row, Row, Row Your Boat with its chorus 'life is but a dream' also keeps cropping up. Max and Hans begin to dream each other's lives.
When Max sleeps he 'sees' Hans's life, and vice versa. Are we being teased that the entire novel is a dream? Or that dreams allow us to communicate with other lives?
As much of the novel's denouement depends on information received by Max from his 'Hans dreams' it does feel as if we're being slightly cheated by the lack of explanation.
If we're subject to a constant deus ex machina, then it would be good to know exactly how the machine works.
When this novel is good, though, it's excellent. The shared moments between Max, Sophie and Jens are tender and funny, taking you right back to the days of your own youth.
The scenes where Hans must betray his Nazi overlords to be true to himself are palm-sweatingly tense.
Every so often, though, the book does frustrate. In the Paris of both world's, Sophie is married. There are times when the secret assignations between Sophie and Max seem more akin to French farce than high romance.
Let's just say that she must have married the stupidest man in Paris to get away with her affair for even an afternoon.
As the book closes, the two loves of Sophie Strom - Max and Hans - almost merge across this magical gulf of time and space which separates them. They communicate in dreams, each shaping the other's reality.
Taylor has written an almost perfect summer read. That doesn't mean it's an almost perfect novel. There's a difference.
This is the kind of book I like to take on holiday. It's well-written, with moments of rousing beauty. It races along like a patented page-turner. It's very good. But it is not great.
When I'm on holiday I don't necessarily want to read books which demand my brain fires on all cylinders.
In truth, when on holiday, I want a book which relaxes me. I'm not looking for mindless fun; I'm looking for intelligent entertainment.
I want a well-crafted escapist novel that moves me, that's worth reading. Self-evidently, such a book won't change the world of literature or upend the way you think about the novel.
But it's on that note that I urge you to slip Sophie Strom into your suitcase before you go on holiday. You won't regret it.
Taylor will move you, and he may well make you shed a few tears, but like a dream the novel will fade as you return to the reality of your everyday life.