Tag Archives: World War II

When the Wheels Come Off: The Mitford Secret

27 Monday Mar 2023

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Review: The Mitford Secret, by Jessica Fellowes
Minotaur, 2023. 365 pp. $29

It’s late December 1941, and the Luftwaffe is pounding London. Deborah Mitford, daughter in a famous family related by marriage to the duke of Devonshire, arranges a house party at Chatsworth, the ducal estate. Among others, she invites Louisa Sullivan, onetime nursemaid of her childhood, now a private detective in London, and Louisa’s six-year-old daughter, Maisie.

As a guest where once she was a servant, Louisa worries that beyond Deborah and one other Mitford sister, Nancy, the aristocrats will resent her presumption. Louisa’s also missing her husband, Guy, the other half of their detective agency, who must remain in London.

With such a large cast, which includes Fred Astaire’s sister, Adele, and Kathleen Kennedy, sister to future politicians—both women have married Devonshires, or hope to—the mystery takes a while to set up. Then comes a village woman, uninvited, Mrs. Hoole, who insists the bluebloods check “the vestibule” for a vital object.

Sure enough, Louisa leads the charge and unearths a bloodied maidservant’s cap. Mrs. Hoole persuades the Mitfords to let her conduct a séance, during which it’s revealed that a maid was murdered at Chatsworth in 1916. Louisa sets out to investigate.

Imperial Japanese Navy photo of the Pearl Harbor attack, December 7, 1941 (courtesy U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Neither the Mitfords nor the local constabulary want her to discover anything that might embarrass the family, even after another death occurs. Fellowes creates the social maze of country gentility through which the London commoner wanders, with plenty of “no—and furthermore” to hamper her investigation. The story evokes old tropes: the immense, creepy manse, with more rooms than anyone can count; a séance; an old crime that cries out for justice. But Fellowes does just enough to make this narrative her own.

The author also has a keen eye for domestic detail. By chance, I visited the grounds of Chatsworth a half-century ago but never entered the house. This is part of what I missed:

Louisa was in serious danger of believing she was in an H. G. Wells novel and had been magically transported to Rome in a flying car. Ahead of them was a wide staircase that went up to a gallery, the ornate black and gold of the banister circumnavigating the room as a balcony railing. The floor was black and white chequered marble and a fire blazed in a hearth to the side—which did nothing to prevent the room from feeling freezing cold—and there were columns with marble busts atop.

The American guests aren’t the only ones with star power, for the Mitfords are quite a family. Daughter Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists leader, and sister Unity admires Hitler. Diana’s in prison and Unity’s psychologically disturbed, never left alone, whereas another sister, Jessica, in the United States, is mourning her husband, recently killed in action. Consequently, there are conflicts and divisions within this remarkable clan.

Unfortunately, Fellowes resolutely skims the surface, never getting deeper than the famous names. The characters have only a dominant trait or two and no inner lives to speak of. Louisa has no visible flaw except an impulsive way of asking questions, without which she wouldn’t be a private detective. Clichés like “supercilious sneer” punctuate scenes in which Louisa has tried and failed to elicit information from tight-lipped sources.

But even those shortcomings would matter less if the story made sense; about halfway through, the wheels come off. An RAF officer stationed near Chatsworth somehow allows the family and guests to visit the airfield—they even sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire—and he subsequently warns of a forthcoming air raid, many hours away. Nobody wonders how or why any of this could happen, so when the plot turns on the officer’s words and actions, they’re amazed. Right.

How frustrating to read a mystery, trying to think along with the detective, only to discover that logic doesn’t apply. Forget about placing yourself in the story, wondering how you’d react in a given circumstance, arguably the whole point of reading a novel. There’s nothing to hold onto amid the contrivance.

The historical background, or lack thereof, feels similarly tricked up. At least twice, the narrative refers to “fighting in France” or “men at the front,” phrases from 1916, not December 1941. Fellowes seems not to have heard of Dunkerque or the German occupation of France. A minor point, perhaps, yet telling; she doesn’t seem to have heard of Pearl Harbor, either.

This story begins only ten days after Japan attacked, and by the time the guests gather at Chatsworth, Japanese forces are ripping through Malaya and battering the gates of Singapore, both British possessions. The wheels have come off, for the world at large and the British Empire. But the Mitfords seem to feel nothing about this, nor do their American guests, citizens of a suddenly belligerent nation.

What are we supposed to make of that? Perhaps nothing, for this book is part of a best-selling series, its final volume.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Bad Mother: This Lovely City

06 Monday Mar 2023

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Review: This Lovely City, by Louise Hare
Anansi, 2020. 384 pp. $18

Lawrence (Lawrie) Mathews, a young Jamaican whose brother died fighting with the RAF in World War II, has emigrated to London, believing the blandishments from the British government that he can make his fortune in the mother country. But he hasn’t reckoned on the racism, expressed in the most vicious, direct terms; or that most desirable material goods are still rationed in 1948; or that housing is in short supply, thanks largely to German bombs.

Nevertheless, by 1950, when the story begins, things are looking up. He plays clarinet with a jazz band, which he loves, and which brings in a little cash. As a day job, he delivers mail for the Post Office. And he’s found lodging with a kind, motherly woman who treats him with fond respect. Not just that: Lawrie digs the girl next door, who likes him back. What could go wrong?

Plenty. One day, while making a drop of black-market merchandise to help a friend (and make ends meet), he happens on a dead infant by a pond. Since the child is “coloured,” as the kindest word in common use puts it, an accusation against Lawrie fits all too neatly, especially since he can’t explain his presence at the pond without revealing he’s an accessory to illegal activity. But even a more legitimate excuse probably wouldn’t have helped Lawrie, for Detective Sergeant Rathbone hates Black people, immigrants, and most anyone else on two legs.

Worse, the case creates a sensation in the press, arousing white Londoners itching to blame outsiders for the hardships that haven’t eased much since V-E Day. Lawrie and his Jamaican friends must now watch themselves carefully on the street, while patronizing stores and—most especially—when the jazz band plays dance music for a hard-drinking crowd.

Nelson’s column, London, seen through the Great Smog, December 1952. The climatic disaster lasted five days and caused many thousands of deaths. (Courtesy N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite aspect of This Lovely City is the plot, which twists in unexpected ways, particularly in the final third. Both Lawrie and his girlfriend, Evie Coleridge, have secrets from the other. Evie also has a hard-hearted mother, an apt parallel to England. Mrs. Coleridge has suffered its whips and scorns herself, though that’s why—at least in part—she’s as tough as she is.

I also like how Hare re-creates postwar London, pinched and yearning to let loose, but also violently racist, in which what we would call micro-aggressions quickly flame into just plain aggression. The prose, though simple, occasionally rises to illumine emotional moments particular to that environment, as with this passage about Lawrie playing jazz before an audience:

The nerves would pass soon enough, but the moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think of was how sad they looked, those magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

I wish the characterizations worked with any consistency. Lawrie and Evie seem too good by half, and the terrible secrets they possess never credibly threaten their happiness. At times, quick resolutions—much like Lawrie merely lifting the clarinet to his lips, in the above passage—make me wonder whether Hare’s trying too hard to rescue her characters.

She also portrays Lawrie as a sexual innocent in ways I find hard to believe, particularly when a young woman invites him to take a bath at her house (in the days before he moves next door to Evie), and he has no idea she has plans other than cleanliness. At times too he seems generally clueless about his surroundings, as with his surprise that so much of London was bombed. Not much of a secret, that. What did he think his brother was doing in the RAF?

The two principals often have trouble locating their spines, to the extent that I lost patience with them and wondered what they saw in each other. Wouldn’t each lover seek out someone more forceful than themselves? They’re trying to be pleasant, sure, perhaps hiding behind that to avoid confrontations. Or maybe they confuse asking for what they want with meanness; it’s hard to tell. But whatever the explanation, I wanted more push from each of them, the lack of which might just be convenient to the plot.

As for the villains, the cops are faceless and horrid, without a single redeeming feature, including intelligence, so it’s a surprise to discover they actually know a thing or two. The most complex character in the book—perhaps the only one with sharp edges and kind impulses, both—is Mrs. Coleridge. She’s a piece of work, yet I understand her.

For all that, though, This Lovely City provides a glimpse of London as I’ve never read of it. Despite its flaws, the novel depicts the struggle to get by and dreams of a fuller life in real, day-to-day terms. That’s worth something.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Empathy?: The Welsh Girl

14 Monday Nov 2022

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Review: The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies
Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 333 pp. $10

For Esther Evans, seventeen, June 1944 in Cilgwyn, her village in North Wales, brings sights and sounds of the wider world she dreams of: BBC broadcasts, radio performers from London, English soldiers building an encampment. Living with her sheep-farmer father, who’s a Welsh nationalist, and an ill-tempered young evacuee, Esther has little to excite her except her job at the pub, where she rubs elbows with “foreigners,” including the English corporal with whom she’s stepping out. Don’t tell Dad.

Meanwhile, Karsten Simmering is taken prisoner defending a Normandy beachhead on D-Day. He doesn’t know what to think of himself for surrendering; his fellow prisoners, neck-deep in admiration for the Führer and certain of final victory, shame him for it, conveniently forgetting that they too put their hands up.

You know that Esther and Karsten are destined to cross paths, so you can guess that the encampment being built is for prisoners of war. Their relationship is an intriguing premise, and Davies shapes it well, conveying alliances and resentments with subtlety and aplomb, whether in Cilgwyn or the prison camp. He also colors his narrative with wistfulness, desire for escape, and search for a comfortable, fitting definition for the word nation, which several of his characters seem to lack.

Rudolf Hess, 1933, unknown photographer (courtesy German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I do question how Karsten speaks such fluent English. I also dislike the unmentionable trope that changes Esther’s path, both for itself and its predictability and borrowed from a humorless Victorian novelist (the offending work even rates a mention). But at least Davies makes it his own.

A chief attraction here is the prose, as with this vivid, emotion-laden description of Karsten’s barracks at the camp:

The hut stinks of men, of sweat and feet and damp wool and arseholes, and he rolls over to catch the sporadic scent of the sea. He can make out the smell of the damp trees on wet days, or of dry heather on fine ones. . . .The evenings, once it gets too gloomy to play football, once the dusk deepens and the white dots of sheep on the hillside vanish, are a slow, anxious prelude to this confinement. It makes him feel like a punished child . . . sent to bed early, and he dreads the winter when the days will get shorter and they’ll be locked in even earlier.

Unfortunately, Davies buries the Esther-Karsten narrative under a subplot connected to it only vaguely through the nation-belonging theme, an infelicitous addition at best. The novel begins with Joseph Rotheram, a British intelligence officer of German birth, assigned to observe and question the infamous Rudolf Hess. Hess, Hitler’s righthand man until 1940, when he flew an airplane to England, has spent four years under heavy guard. The Allies contemplate war-crimes trials, at which Hess would be a star defendant. Yet he claims amnesia, and no questioner can penetrate that mask.

Rotheram hates his assignment, especially for the reason he’s there: he’s considered Jewish, an identity he hotly (and accurately) denies, since his mother is Christian. But his superiors insist on saying he is, and they suppose that Hess will detect his “race” and react, whereupon they’ll have their prisoner in a bind. What an anti-Semitic trope, heightened when Rotheram’s officer comrades speak as if he has no country, only a tribe.

Davies knows how to set a scene, and he’s imagined a couple notable confrontations between Rotheram and Hess, especially during a screening of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film. It’s like Hamlet’s play within a play, hoping to catch the conscience of the king.

But to wade into anti-Semitic tropes requires insight, and Davies’s narrative suggests he knows little or nothing about Jews or Judaism. Rotheram’s Jewish only to the extent that others think he is and scorn him for it; he has no thoughts about that identity or his family’s past, other than rejecting it. You might as well say the Welsh characters are Welsh only because the English make bigoted jokes about them.

Toward the novel’s end, Rotheram starts thinking like his anti-Semitic superiors: “The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.” I suspect Davies has no idea his character appears to find liberation in thousands of years of expulsion, enforced statelessness, expropriation, and murder, justified by the slander that Jews owe allegiance to no country.

A critic quoted on the jacket flap praises Davies’s “all-encompassing empathy.” Not quite.

To my fellow historical novelists, please: If you must write about the Holocaust, make sure you treat your Jewish characters as full people. Please don’t deploy them like paperweights to keep themes or plot points from blowing away. Tropes and stereotypes hurt.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lost Child: We Must Be Brave

01 Monday Aug 2022

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Review: We Must Be Brave, by Frances Liardet
Putnam, 2019. 452 pp. $27

When German bombs fall on Southampton, England, in December 1940, the stream of homeless refugees reaching Upton, fifteen miles away, includes a six-year-old girl. According to the tag on her clothes, she’s Pamela Pickering, but no one accompanies her or shepherds her to Upton. It seems a couple women told her to get on a particular bus, or maybe it was her mother.

But circumstances don’t immediately matter, for little Pamela has nowhere to go and, as you might expect, is very upset. Consequently, young Ellen Parr, recently married to the much older owner of the local grain mill, takes the child in, along with other evacuees. For the moment.

Lower High Street, Southampton, after German bombing raids, early December 1940 (courtesy Ministry of Information and Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205022759, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

You need not be clairvoyant to imagine how long that moment will stretch. Ellen’s attempts to trace Pamela’s surviving kin come to nothing, except to learn that the child’s mother died in an air raid, and her father hasn’t been in the picture for a while. Ellen’s husband, Selwyn, tries a little harder to find Pamela’s family; he doesn’t want the girl to remain, even after the other people they’re sheltering leave.

But he’s the soul of kindness, and he can’t help notice how attached Ellen has become to Pamela. He’s also keenly aware that he’s nearly twice Ellen’s age, and since the previous war left him impotent because of shell shock, she won’t have a child any other way. Nevertheless, you still need no crystal ball to guess that Pamela’s a borrowed child.

Like Selwyn, We Must Be Brave is kind and gentle despite the trying, bloody times, a reminder that war often brings out the best in people, not just the worst. The theme is rescue, what it means and how it works in two directions, for the motherless Pamela rescues Ellen too. To Liardet’s credit, she makes Pamela a difficult, if rewarding, charge — willful, disobedient, mercurial, capable of selfishness, yet passionate, resilient, and creative, the sort of child adults love to learn from. Ellen, though unsure of herself as a mother, understands right away that parenting is the art of the possible.

I like Liardet’s prose too, which, without attracting attention, conveys Ellen as a keen observer. This is warm, practical writing, like the narrator herself:

Somewhere in her sleeping mind she’d found a place without grief and knowledge, huddled into it like a mouse into a bole of a tree. I encircled her with my arms for five minutes or so, and she smelled of warm dry brushed cotton, and something else, that somewhat salty aroma of newly baked bread I had noticed when I lifted her off the seat of the bus. What was it? Her heated skin, her hair at the nape of her neck? I didn’t know.

Two aspects of We Must Be Brave trouble me. The first is Selwyn. I don’t understand why Ellen marries him; he seems more like a kindly, older brother, occasionally paternal, than a husband. Moreover, without a second thought, the night of Pamela’s arrival, Ellen places her in the marital bed — perhaps not surprising, but she keeps doing so. Maybe that persistence doesn’t surprise, either, but Selwyn has no reaction. That’s peculiar.

His sexual incapability resulting from the war — a trope, there — would make objections more difficult to lodge, yet he should have feelings about the interloper, I think. Is Ellen afraid of or repelled by sex? Not clear, so it’s hard to say whether she’s just not interested. The narrative suggests that, but for the war, the newlyweds would have happily led a childless life, traveling often, unencumbered. But exactly where her feelings lie never comes through, except when, years later, a friend makes a tactless, if accurate, remark about him.

Perhaps to explain Ellen’s attraction to Selwyn, the narrative backtracks to her excruciating childhood with a snobbish mother, a deadbeat father who falls into financial ruin and abandons them, and the grinding poverty that follows. That’s problem number two. I get that Selwyn’s kindness and stability offer Ellen what she lacked, and her hand-to-mouth existence then, told in unsparing detail, hits home. But that section, rather too long by half, still doesn’t persuade me about Selwyn — or at least, Ellen might entertain regrets, now and then — and slows the narrative.

In a novel like this, endgame matters perhaps more than in most, and though I get uncomfortable when the story wanders too close to modern times — not my taste —Liardet brings her narrative to a satisfying conclusion. We Must Be Brave is one of those novels that will speak to you after you’ve finished it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Trauma and Post-Trauma: Death at Greenway

30 Monday May 2022

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Review: Death at Greenway, by Lori Rader-Day
Morrow, 2021. 414 pp. $28

Bridget Kelly, a nineteen-year-old nurse-in-training, has been dismissed from a London hospital, probably an unusual occurrence to begin with. Worse, this is April 1941, wartime, and with nurses in such short supply, you just know Bridget must have messed up horribly. In her parting words, the nurse matron has harangued Bridget for coldness, arrogance, inability to concentrate, and more besides. Whew.

But Matron has given her one last chance: to accompany a group of young children to Devon, where they’re to be evacuated for the war’s duration, presumably safe from the bombs hitting London daily. The country house that will be their billet belongs to Agatha Christie, a fact of no consequence to Bridget, who doesn’t read stories — they hit her in the gut, literally.

Agatha Christie, Dame of the British Empire, in 1958; photo of a plaque (courtesy Torre Abbey.jpg: Violetriga, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rather, she’s wondering how to manage ten children, a chore that scares her, and for which she thinks she has no aptitude. Meanwhile, she’s reeling from the deaths of her mother and younger siblings from a German bomb, so the sight of any child can be dangerous for her.

When she first sets eyes on her charges-to-be at the train station, her heart sinks, because she has imagined older children, easier to care for:

The children were tots, baby fat in their knees below shorts and skirts, socks pulled up or sliding, shoes scuffed or untied. They had tags affixed to their coats and child-sized gas masks in paper cases and straps around their necks. They wore caps or hats or bonnets and flung them to the ground in a tantrum. Those who were carried by their mums kicked to be let down. Two were infants, dear God.

But Bridget has one hope, a fellow nurse to share the load — until that nurse, who claims also to be named Bridget Kelly, doesn’t seem to know the first thing about children, the human body, or caring for anyone else’s needs. For that matter, as Bridget discovers, few people or things she runs across are as they seem. No sooner have they arrived in Devon than she has her doubts about the house staff, the people leading the evacuation, and the local characters, whose intense suspicion of outsiders may have a darker side.

Her skepticism is often warranted, but as Matron’s criticisms ring repeatedly in her ears, you begin to wonder just what was going on there. For instance, is Bridget really arrogant? Hardly; she’s too self-effacing by half. She only seems withdrawn, because when circumstances call for intense emotion, her post-traumatic stress kicks in, manifesting itself as the aforementioned hits to the gut. And that, of course, she can’t reveal.

But that’s only for starters. As she tries to settle in, an intruder or two stalks the property, precious food supplies go missing, and, eventually, a dead body washes up on shore. Connected events, or coincidental?

Mysteries and thrillers generally go by the moniker of plot-driven, but not Death at Greenway. This one’s character all the way, and it’s masterful. You get the nurses, the staff, the neighbors, the atmosphere, the house, the PTSD, and they all move the story. Aside from Bridget and her nursing colleague, I single out the local doctor, who’s too handsome by half and sensitive to feelings but somehow off, and an artist living on the property who’s got a battleship-sized sense of entitlement.

Rader-Day peels back layer upon layer of mystery, misunderstanding, and “no — and furthermore.” If the narrative proceeds more gradually than in other mysteries — the dead body, for instance, doesn’t show up until page 115 – the tension nevertheless keeps you riveted.

How? The author shows you Bridget beneath the skin and the fear, isolation, and resentment everyone breathes with each inhalation, which marks them and makes for potent drama. I admire that kind of storytelling, which doesn’t need a man with a gun to raise the stakes. This narrative may seem “quiet” for a mystery, to use a publishing buzzword that no two people define the same way. Gentle reader, don’t be deterred.

I’ve also never read as gripping or accurate a description of post-traumatic stress, unless it was in Daniel Mason’s fine novel, The Winter Soldier — and he’s a psychiatrist. Moreover, Rader-Day captures the underside of Britain’s so-called finest hour, portraying less-than-heroic behaviors, reminiscent of Lissa Evans’s novels, though without the irony or humor. Here in Devon, they’re playing for keeps.

For those who like Agatha Christie — I don’t particularly — the setting will appeal as well. And just in case you’re thinking from what I’ve said that the mystery must take second place to the characterization and somehow muddle its way through, let me assure you that the plot goes through as many twists and turns as the seaside Devon roadways.

Death at Greenway is a fine mystery and a brilliant re-creation of the British home front, worth your time in both respects.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Washington, 1942: Louise’s War

11 Monday Apr 2022

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Review: Louise’s War, by Sarah B. Shaber
Severn, 2011. 194 pp. $28

American involvement in World War II is six months old, and everybody and her sister flocks to the nation’s capital to find a job. Louise Pearlie, whose husband has died years before and can’t bear to remain in rural North Carolina, has brought her excellent secretarial skills and work experience to the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence organization. Gossip has it that the Allies will invade North Africa within months, hence the OSS search for maps of the coastline and experts who understand the beaches.

A 1943 poster for the Office of War Information by George Rapp (OWI poster 55, courtesy Library of Congress; public domain)

One such authority is Gerald Bloch, a French Jew married to a school friend of Louise’s. From what little news she’s received, Louise gathers that Gerald and Rachel are stuck in Marseilles, while reports say that the Vichy government has made sure that no Jews will receive exit visas. Deportation looms, and Louise, who owes Rachel a huge debt, wishes she could help.

Theoretically, the OSS could claim that Gerald Bloch would provide necessary information concerning the upcoming invasion. But the file on him goes missing during the confusion ensuing from the fatal heart attack suffered by the director of Louise’s section. At first, she thinks nothing of this, but soon, at tremendous risk, she sets out to discover how and why a sensitive dossier could simply vanish, and whether recovering it would save the Blochs.

It’s an excellent premise, if a mite dependent on coincidence, but Shaber’s narrative has a lot going for it. For starters, I like how she’s drawn Louise. Growing up poor and churchy, Louise doesn’t quite know what to make of the big city, where old values get shunted aside in the business of making war. The tremendous crush of people in a hurry and under pressure, with ambition and money to spend, offers temptations she’s not used to, but which attract her. Her parents want her to remarry, but she enjoys her independence, even if she wonders what it would feel like to have the financial security and creature comforts she’d never afford on her own.

That said, Louise also knows that many, if not most, men expect women to keep quiet and use their brains only to help solve male problems, for which, of course, they’ll receive no credit. But her common sense doesn’t prevent her from wanting what might not be good for her. I like that complexity.

The other winning facet of Louise’s War is the atmosphere. Whether it’s fabric shortages, the bus company’s refusal to hire Black drivers, people trying to get around the sugar ration, or the habit of traveling GIs tossing letters out train windows, knowing that someone will stamp and mail them, Shaber knows her ground and deploys details with skill. Here, Louise rolls her eyes at the portrayal of women in a popular magazine:

In its cheerful stories women skipped off to work in full make-up with neatly coiffed hair pulled back in colorful do-rags, carrying lunch pails full of healthy home-made food. Their overalls didn’t get dirty no matter how filthy the job. If they weren’t married with an obliging mother at home caring for their children, they were engaged to a shop foreman or a military officer. None of them were war widows or lived in boarding houses or had to park their children in crowded day nurseries.

Given that keen eye and grasp of psychology, I’m surprised to stumble across a cardinal error. Louise’s first-person narration works just fine, but, for some reason, Shaber shoehorns brief, usually first-person, sections belonging to minor characters, ostensibly to reveal information Louise couldn’t know. Since these look as clumsy as they sound, you have to ask, Does the reader need to know? I doubt it.

Pretty much everything would have kept until Louise manages to discover it, and her ignorance could have heightened the tension, complicating her attempts to parse conflicting evidence. As it is, the story telegraphs answers to a couple major questions when, with little effort, the author might have shaded the account of events to create doubt and keep the reader guessing along with Louise.

Less glaring to the general reader, though unfortunately common in fiction, the Jewish characters don’t feel genuine, which turns them into a narrative convenience. I also object to how certain authors consistently say “Nazis” to identify those who invaded other countries and committed mass murder and expropriation, as though “ordinary” Germans distanced themselves from those crimes.

I can’t help think that the author, or her publisher, wants to separate people we like from those we can hate with abandon. Too bad. Similarly, the novel presents a likable, admirable protagonist, born and raised in North Carolina, who befriends the Black women servants in her boardinghouse without a second thought. That seems a little easy.

Nevertheless, in other ways Louise’s War brilliantly presents a city during conflict, a heroine whose voice draws you in, and a mystery that will keep you turning the pages.

Disclaimer: I obtained by reading copy of this book from the public library.

Industrial Murder: The German Heiress

24 Monday Jan 2022

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Review: The German Heiress, by Anika Scott
Morrow, 2020. 357 pp. $17

Two years after World War II has ended, Clara Falkenberg is on the run. Living under an assumed name, on unconvincing fake papers, and with no visible means of support, Clara might be no different from many other Germans who’ve got something to hide. Except she’s the heiress to the Falkenberg mines and ironworks in Essen (a fictive rival to Krupp), and for her wartime activities helping to manage the firm, a British intelligence captain named Fenshaw is on her tail.

Like every other industrial concern, Falkenberg used up and spat out slave laborers by the thousands, which makes Clara an accessory to war crimes, if not a perpetrator. And when she dares attempt to return to bombed-out Essen, hoping to take refuge with a childhood friend, Fenshaw’s thinking right along with her. No matter where she goes, or what she does, he’s never far behind, and there are plenty of people willing to betray anyone for the right price.

706px-Auschwitz-Birkenau_Complex_-_Oswiecim,_Poland_-_NARA_-_305897

U.S. military intelligence photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 1944, which shows the I. G. Farben installation, lower center (courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I salute Scott’s authorial bravery in attempting to cast a heroine from a war-criminal mold. I’m not sure she succeeds entirely — or, to be precise, whether she tells her tale with enough moral consciousness, having decided, for obvious reasons, to avoid certain enormities. But The German Heiress nevertheless has a few things going for it, and Scott tries to finesse the moral questions, grounding them in family relationships whose participants may or may not have deluded themselves.

To an extent, that works, though the strategy leaves two unmentioned, outsized elephants in the room — the slave labor program in its conception and practice, and the Holocaust. The Third Reich as a systematically murderous, exploitive regime never quite makes it to these pages, in part because the only visible inhuman act occurs on a relatively small scale and appears, in retrospect, only toward the end.

But approach the novel on its given terms, and you have a vigorous narrative peopled by unusual characters. Clara herself, if perhaps too lightly dealt with from a moral standpoint, has a passion to know the truth about her family, especially her beloved father, now interned as a war criminal. Does he deserve that? she wonders. What did he really think when he saw what was happening, because surely, he must have known? Where does that put her?

Her soul-searching redeems her somewhat, and I appreciate the author’s difficulty here, attempting to make a sympathetic character out of a slave overseer. Clara does have a certain appealing warmth and vivacity, and I like how Scott handles a nascent romance with Jakob, a disabled veteran turned black marketeer. The connection grows slowly, incrementally, with back-tracking and deal-cutting involved.

The storytelling keeps a rapid pace, and the pages turn. The plot revolves around Fenshaw’s pursuit and, more importantly, Clara’s uncovering of ugly family secrets that force her to reexamine her moral position and what she’s responsible for. Whether you can accept Clara’s insulation from stark wartime realities may depend on your point of view, but at least the family loyalty comes through, as does her disillusionment when she learns the truth. As for the narrative as a whole, Jakob’s voice enters abruptly, as does that of a young, disturbed boy who doesn’t believe the war has ended. But these bumps even out as the novel progresses, and Jakob steals many of the scenes he’s in. With him, as with Clara, Scott deploys detail with aplomb:

The stranger caught him, gasped at his weight, buckled and then stabilized. His smell hurtled Jakob back to days he didn’t want to remember. It was the smell of the front, of damp wool and oiled leather, of bergamot and citrus eau de cologne that didn’t quite cover the stink of a soldier’s fear. Whoever it was, he was thin, and he was shaking, and for the few moments Jakob had his arms around him, he felt the stranger’s wildly beating heart.

Two weak links mar the novel. I don’t believe Fenshaw for one second, whether it’s his fanatical pursuit of Clara, his broad-brush character, his fascination with her (which even dates from before the war), or his astonishing security lapses that further the plot. Given all these, the end, the second weak link, seems not only melodramatic but highly improbable.

That said, The German Heiress, a debut novel, is a provocative story, and I like those. And since I’m the type who can’t look at a Bayer aspirin bottle without thinking of the company’s infamous, erstwhile parent, I. G. Farben (disbanded after the war), that I sat still for this book instead of throwing it across the room testifies to the author’s talent for diverting me.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Many Identities, One Extraordinary Woman: Code Name Hélène

06 Monday Dec 2021

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Review: Code Name Hélène, by Ariel Lawhon
Doubleday, 2020. 437 pp. $28

When we first meet Nancy Wake in late February 1944, she’s parachuting out of an airplane over France, assigned to finance, arm, and train Resistance groups in the Auvergne. An Australian-born journalist by training and adventurer by temperament, Nancy goes by several other names, depending on what role she’s playing. Safe to say, though, that if her biography resembles this novel in the slightest — and the author assures us it does — few people could claim to have had a more hair-raising or active role in clandestine World War II operations. Her constant struggle against men who dismiss or try to exploit her adds a superb, extra layer to the story.

Studio portrait of Nancy Wake, 1945, in a nursing uniform, photographer unknown (courtesy Australian War Memorial on line catalogue ID Number: P00885.001, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Imagine someone talking her way into a job as a stringer for Hearst, with no reporting experience, and turning that into several scoops, including an interview with Hitler, another with a much sought-after Austrian Jewish refugee, and a visit to Vienna to confirm his account of brutality. None of those feats rates a byline, because Hearst won’t give her one — sexism, again. Oh, and by the way, she has one of the richest, most charming men in France wrapped around her finger.

From start to finish, Code Name Hélène will grab you and refuse to let go. It’s got to be one of the most compelling World War II stories I’ve ever read. What’s more, we have several narratives, not just the romance and the clandestine activity but further divisions within each, yet Lawhon stitches them seamlessly, from prewar to the war’s darkest days and back. Rest assured that “no — and furthermore” comes thick and fast. As a narrative of action, heartbreak, and sheer brass, Code Name Hélène is hard to beat.

Like any good novelist, Lawhon puts the reader in every scene with physical, active detail evoking emotion, and that’s what hooks you. You could pick any page for an example, but consider this description of Janos Lieberman, the escaped Jewish refugee, whom Nancy meets in Paris in 1936:

He’s pleasant-looking but not remarkable. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Dark stubble across his solemn face. It’s the jagged pink scar cutting its way from earlobe to eyeball that makes him instantly recognizable. The whip split him clean to the bone and nearly took out his left eye in the process. Even from this distance the stitch marks are still evident, little pocked craters at even intervals along his cheekbone. The scar looks like a broken zipper, and he will be forever marked by its ferocity. You cannot help but stare when you see him.

Such technique should apply in any novel, but it’s absolutely essential to portray a character like Nancy, who’s not just larger than life; she’s larger than any three lives put together. If the author did not show each moment in its fullness, portraying its intricacies, mysteries, and, often its physical demands on Nancy, which can be excruciating, you might not believe a word. But because you’re inside her skin constantly, you accept what happens.

That said, you might not accept other aspects of the novel, starting with the portrayal of France and the apparent play to a stereotype, the so-called French obsession with sex. I have no idea whether Lawhon intends this, but as a longtime student of French culture and history, I sense it, and it feels like pandering. Where the French take sex as a natural function, Anglo-Saxons find decadence, fit for squirms, shock, and sorry pilgrimages to the Moulin Rouge.

Speaking of men and women, Nancy’s French lover seems to have no inner life, except as it relates to her. He’s a Marseille businessman, a man-about-town, and politically committed, so why doesn’t he have dreams and desires other than Nancy? Many male authors have been rightly criticized for creating female characters who exist solely for the men around them. The fault also applies in reverse.

As for Nancy’s characterization, I kept wanting to find a flaw and couldn’t. Oh, she insists on her perks, sleeping on a mattress in a nightgown, while the Resistance fighters she commands are lucky to have a blanket. But that’s part of her charm, and everyone understands that nobody is tougher than she is or has her physical endurance. I wish that Lawhon had stopped there, however, and eliminated the Hollywood confrontation scenes, complete with righteous speechmaking.

By contrast, Nancy’s antagonists are all bad, including her male rivals within the Resistance. No one, other than they and the Germans, betrays sadism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia. The flimsiest prototype is Marceline, Nancy’s rival for her lover’s affections and another instance of Hollywood—the Other Woman with six-inch fangs.

So Code Name Hélène is a curious mix, an absolutely riveting story that sweeps you away and conquers disbelief, yet peopled by figures who seem too cut-and-dried to be real. Treat yourself and read this novel, by all means. But if you’re like me, you’ll keep the salt shaker handy.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Deception’s Toll: An Unlikely Spy

22 Monday Nov 2021

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Review: An Unlikely Spy, by Rebecca Starford
Ecco, 2021. 338 pp. $28

Evelyn Varley has made something of herself, she thinks. It’s late 1939, and the girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Lewes, East Sussex, has come a long way since she won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, then Oxford, where she took Firsts in German and literature. Along the way, she befriended Sally Wesley, a girl from a wealthy family that practically adopted Evelyn, showering her with the warmth, hospitality, excursions, gifts, and spirited conversation she never received at home. And when war breaks out, Sally’s father recommends Evelyn to a friend in government, and presto! she gets a job with the War Office.

At first, that means typing and filing, nothing glamorous, and her office is situated in an old prison, to boot. But eventually, MI5 recruits her to infiltrate an organization of British Nazis. Appalled by their views, especially their violent anti-Semitism, Evelyn nevertheless steels herself to the task, unaware that she will have to choose between her conscience, loyalty to country, and her lifelong friends.

The Olympia Exhibition Centre, London, where a British Union of Fascists meeting in 1934 turned violent, costing the movement support. At its height, the BUF boasted more than 50,000 members. (Courtesy Kenneth Allen, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Character-driven thrillers are unusual in themselves, and this one’s terrific. Don’t be put off by the opening, a somewhat confusing section that takes place after the war. I think the author wants you to know that something shocking has happened, to hold your interest, after which the novel goes into Evelyn’s back story. It’s a prologue by another name, and I understand why Starford takes this approach, but it feels clumsy in parts, not at all like the rest of the book. The narrative sorts itself out soon enough, though, and you see how Evelyn unwittingly trains for her future career.

At her boarding school, as the poor girl, she’s the “charity case,” the butt of vicious hazing. Sally rescues her somewhat, being an outsider too, a connection I find a little hard to believe. But if it’s a false note, it’s the only one. Evelyn succeeds socially on her own where Sally doesn’t, by copying their tormentors and earning their acceptance. The price she pays is steep, however — forgetting who she is, learning her new friends’ contempt for her origins, and hiding behind a dissembling heart. Years later:

Sometimes, as Evelyn lay in her bed upstairs, she was wracked by loneliness. She loved her parents, but now she could see them for their true selves, free from the burnish of childish idolatry or just plain youthful ignorance. She knew her father belittled her because he couldn’t face the idea of her one day looking down on him, and she recognized how meager her mother’s existence had become, counting out her shillings at the bakery and going without new clothes or books or an outing to a restaurant, refusing any activity that she deemed indulgent. Evelyn was embarrassed by this puritan denial of even the smallest forms of pleasure. She didn’t want her life to be a mere transaction; she wanted to feel the workings of experience deep in her bones. She knew her parents sensed this change in her, but since she could never tell them about what really happened at school, she had to live with the knowledge that they believed she had actually become this person and was not merely wearing a disguise.

Consequently, she’s got the makeup of a perfect operative, capable of assuming a necessary guise, belonging nowhere, therefore adaptable. But once again, she pays an extortionate price for the thrill of being useful, the knowledge that she’s standing up for her beliefs, which leads her to deceive people, including herself.

What a brilliant portrayal, the better for Evelyn’s hesitations and insecurities. So often, spies in fiction have ice water for blood and seldom make mistakes, only bad bets because they’ve been misled or have no choice. Evelyn’s a different sort altogether, struggling not to engage emotionally, wondering every second if she’s overplayed her hand, and unsure what she’s accomplished, if anything. Unlike many in her trade, she shies away from damaging anyone, unaware that she’s done it despite herself. Sally’s fiancé, a handsome, thoughtless brute, thinks of pain as an “accolade,” Evelyn believes, “something to be earned, and something to be inflicted.” She despises him but has yet to learn how the manipulations she’s assigned to perform work the same way. The reader senses what she doesn’t.

Starford has a gift for active physical description that evokes feelings — there are some truly lovely passages —and she’s at her best among the British Nazis. Their rallies, riots, harangues, and even their quiet dinner parties curdle the blood. Their belief beyond all persuasion that Jews have destroyed their lives and run the world has never gone out of style, so that the historical feels like now. I can’t help think that the author has intended a tacit comparison to alt-right conspiracy theorists, no matter what human target they favor.

This chilling, moving novel, at once character-driven and a page-turner, deserves attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Matchmaking and Mayhem: A Rogue’s Company

11 Monday Oct 2021

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Review: A Rogue’s Company, by Allison Montclair
Minotaur, 2021. 337 pp. $27

London in 1946 is a city struggling to get on its feet again, amid perennial food shortages, all-too-slow postwar reconstruction, and grief over losses. What a perfect time and place for the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a fledgling business devoted to repopulating a bloodied world.

Iris Sparks, one of its two principals, accustomed to tight spaces and violent men, persuades her partner, (Mrs.) Gwendolyn Bainbridge, war widow, to receive martial arts training. London has mean streets, after all; men are men; and Sparks and Bainbridge have paired up on more than one amateur criminal investigation, so you never know when a well-placed karate chop may come in handy.

Royal Artillery searchlights form part of the Victory Parade, London, June 1946 (courtesy Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

No one could provide a more deserving target than Lord Bainbridge, Gwen’s bully of a father-in law, who has just returned from Africa, where he has mining interests. Technically, Gwen’s a member of the board of directors, or should be, having inherited her late husband’s shares. But Lord Bainbridge has taken custody of that inheritance, because his son’s death sent Gwen into a psychological tailspin, and, by court order, a psychiatrist must declare her competent before she may assert control over her assets. That ruling also applies to her seven-year-old son, whom her father-in-law intends to pack off to the same brutal boarding school inflicted on the boy’s father — and Gwen can do nothing to stop this.

A Rogue’s Company takes a minute to percolate the mystery, but no worries, there. Iris and Gwen are characters you’ll enjoy, with wit and verve to spare, and present a contrast in their origins and social views. Both must negotiate their class differences, not only with each other, but their respective friends, and though I would have liked to see more uncertainty in them, questioning whether their connection will last, they’re an interesting mix. Their bond feels genuine. Ironically, neither of them is married, though they have admirers. Gwen still mourns her husband, but you get the idea that she’s in no hurry to become intimate with anybody again.

They do diverge in their toleration for danger. (Hint: Iris, who seems to have been an intelligence operative, craves it.) However, neither fears to upset convention, as when an importunate board member of Bainbridge, Limited, tries to pry into Gwen’s “absence,” the time during which she received psychological treatment. To ward him off, she replies that she went to prison. Why? he asks, astonished. She killed a man, she says. Why? “For asking too many personal questions.” To his credit, the board member laughs; so did I.

Still, you know that the menace circling the Right Sort Marriage Bureau will erupt into action. And when a man’s found dead near the Livingstone Club, where colonials go to drink and disport themselves, the game’s afoot. Before they’re done, financial shenanigans, a kidnapping, and much listening-in on conversations will take place.

The narrative doesn’t take itself too seriously — one of its charms — yet there’s content alongside the entertainment. The story delves a little into race prejudice, gender roles and expectations, and the intersection of pride and violence, treading lightly, to be sure. Sparks and Bainbridge have something to them, in other words, and aren’t merely the framework for a mystery. Montclair’s not in too much of a hurry, and I like that.

I also like the writing, willing to linger on emotional moments and offer physical description with psychological resonance. Here’s one example, as when Iris is driven past Kensington High Street, Kensington Gore, and onto Kensington Road:

Streets are like spies, she thought. They passed through where you live, changing identities according to local customs, and disappear without notice. She tried to remember what a gore was. Something topographical, vaguely triangular, but she couldn’t help imagining the neighborhood steeped in blood every time she traveled through it. She wondered if anyone else made that connection, or if it had just become another name without meaning over time.

The novel (and I) could have done without the prologue — what else is new? — and a couple loose ends affix themselves with perhaps too much ease. One or two of the nastier characters soften a tad, maybe in ways they shouldn’t. I’m also skeptical that Sparks, despite her background, can be so blasé about crime scenes; I think even the hardest-boiled detective (which she isn’t) would at least wince. But A Rogue’s Company, the third installment in the Sparks and Bainbridge series, is an engrossing, delightful book, well worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.