One can argue that giv­en the time and place, the love shared by Adele and Man­fred is sin­ful because it involves mutu­al trans­gres­sions of reli­gious or moral law and because it is delib­er­ate. Togeth­er, the pair defy the body of rules and prin­ci­ples gov­ern­ing the affairs of a com­mu­ni­ty by naive­ly believ­ing that ​“We are the new Euro­pean order.…We will help to build a world where this can’t hap­pen any­more… French and Ger­man togeth­er.” When their affair is revealed, the Roeun/​French com­mu­ni­ty trans­gress­es the laws of human decen­cy and pun­ish­es in their own way: as ​“a man began to shave (Adele’s) head,” and ​“a woman came for­ward and paint­ed (Adele’s) skull in cold, wet criss-crossing.”

One can also iden­ti­fy sev­er­al sub­texts as trans­gres­sions. There is an under­ly­ing thread of failed father-son rela­tion­ships that defy rules of con­duct estab­lished by cus­tom. The sep­a­ra­tion of fam­i­lies and the con­comi­tant search for them involve trans­gres­sions between soci­eties and author­i­ty: In France, Adele begins the search for her father, the esteemed Dr. Hen­ri Paul-Louis, ​“who had gone miss­ing in action against the Ger­mans” by going to the Domes­tic Pop­u­la­tion Bureau of Infor­ma­tion, a Wehrma­cht office; in Cana­da, Jack Cullen, local chief of police, seeks to solve a mur­der. In both sit­u­a­tions, there are trans­gres­sions of law by those respon­si­ble for enforc­ing it; yet, the mys­ter­ies trans­gress as well.

There is love, war, sus­pense, and psy­cho­log­i­cal innu­en­do in this nov­el and each is pre­sent­ed as a series — more than one — of transgressions.