Even over 60 years after the end of the Second World War, stories are still emerging, of tragedy, treachery, and triumph, of heartbreak and heroism. To be strictly accurate, the story in the book is not entirely new, having been dealt with in parts in the memoirs of a number of the people involved. What Rosemary Sullivan has done is to draw on these sources and her own considerable research to produce a more complete account of the American Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and its offshoot in France, the Centre Américain de Secours (CAS).

Both the organisations were the creation of two men: the Austrian-born anti-Fascist activist Paul Hagen and the American journalist Varian Fry, who had witnessed and reported on the brutalities of the Nazis in the mid-‘30s. They were aware that the Nazis had a list of people designated as ‘enemies of the Reich’ – political activists, intellectuals, artists of all kinds who had spoken out against fascism – who had fled Germany. With war approaching, they realised that these people, many of whom had settled in France were once again at risk. The ERC was the medium for raising money for the rescue of those on the list; the CAS its operational arm based in Marseille, headed by Fry.

Essentially this is the story of Varian Fry, his helpers and the people they helped to escape from occupied France in the 13 months from August 1940 to September 1941, a period roughly equivalent to that between the French surrender and establishment of the Vichy regime and the German invasion of the remainder of France. Told as a conventional narrative, the story would probably be only half the length of this book, but Ms Sullivan has chosen to reflect the tangled web of disrupted lives in an equally complicated structure.

Thus an early chapter takes us to a dinner party in the Villa Air-Bel, outside Marseille, in October 1940, some months after Fry’s arrival and setting up of the CAS. Here we meet a dozen or so characters, including Fry himself, some of the people he had recruited and some of the refugees awaiting exit permits or visas. The book then flashes back, in the manner of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, to recount how each of those present had come to be there. As it happened, the refugees had for the most part fled from Paris to the Vichy zone in the south and ultimately to Marseille. Hence not only were their reasons for flight very similar but so were their journeys, although there were some parting and crossing of their ways en route, making them appear repetitive. The similarities of these accounts has a curious effect: these tales of people fleeing for their very lives, which should be exciting and dramatic, are strangely uninvolving, and the loss of impetus this entails is never really recovered.

Ms Sullivan is a biographer and a poet. She shares the former’s passion for the minutiae dredged up by research. Which was whose favourite table at whatever Left Bank café is the sort of detail that lends verisimilitude to novels like The Day of the Jackal, where fiction stories are blended with real-life people, places and incidents; here they tend merely to bog down such action as there is. It is perhaps her poet’s sensitivity that causes Ms Sullivan to try to get inside her characters; however, it strains credibility when she describes in detail what they are thinking. By the time we get back to the dinner party, we are nearly half-way through the book. The story then continues with the subsequent successes and occasional failures of the CAS, with detailed accounts of the problems the members of the committee faced in pursuing their purposes under the administration of an increasingly collaborationist government. This was not helped by the fact that the CAS used both legal and illegal means. They bought forged documents, became involved with dangerous criminal elements and unofficially extended their brief to help British servicemen to escape from France.

Although the book is sympathetic to Fry and his problems, it is apparent that many of these were of his own making. He contrived to alienate the US State Department and the consuls in France, both of whose support he needed to get US entry or transit visas for his clients, and even the members of the ERC, who were eventually obliged to dismiss him for non-cooperation after his return to America. There is also a suggestion of amateurishness about the whole operation: it never seems to have occurred to Fry that he might be, as in fact he was, under surveillance from the moment of his arrival at Marseille. The involvement with gangsters, with near-disastrous consequences more than once, also suggests a degree of naivety.

Despite all this, the CAS managed in its short life to help a considerable number of people, both on and off the Nazis' list, to escape. The subject has the elements of a good story but it has complications enough without the superimposition of an even more complex narrative structure.

Published in paperback by John Murray, 478pp ISBN 978-0-7195-66943   £9.99