Tag Archives: World War II

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.

Sister, Friend, Rival: Shanghai Girls

28 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See
Random House, 2009. 336 pp. $17

Pearl and her sister, May, live the good life in Shanghai, in 1935. They earn money posing for an artist friend, who puts their faces on commercial calendars, so they are known as “beautiful girls.” They get good tables at clubs and restaurants and party at all hours, hardly noticing the vast ocean of poor surrounding them. Pearl, elder by three years, feels herself the less favored sister, though she’s gone to college, and May won’t ever. Their parents, traditional and strict, dote on the younger, prettier, daughter, to the point that Pearl doubts they even notice her, except to criticize, which her father does constantly. May’s not above using her favored position to twist him around her finger.

However, all that’s about to become irrelevant. To the sisters’ shock, their father says he’s had severe financial reversals. Not only does that mean the party’s over, he’s arranged marriages for them, to sons of his most important creditor, who lives in Los Angeles. After the wedding, a ceremony that pleases nobody, May and Pearl are to sail to Hong Kong, after which they’ll rejoin their new husbands in the United States. That’s it; no argument.

Needless to say, the sisters hate every part of this, and they tell each other they’ll do what no Chinese daughter ever does, disobey their father. They have no intention of leaving Shanghai. Their husbands are ridiculous matches for them, especially May’s groom, who’s only fourteen and seems not all there. But their father hasn’t told them the hardest truth, which is that he’s flat broke and in debt to loan sharks, who’ll throw the family onto the street in a couple days. As if that weren’t enough, May and Pearl don’t even have time to plead, because the Japanese attack. Leaving Shanghai now becomes a necessity as well as a chore.

The bombing of Shanghai, August 1937. This image captures the scene outside the Palace Hotel (courtesy Institut d’Asie Orientale, Lyon, France, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

You may wonder, as I did, how traditional Chinese parents—the mother binds her feet—have raised two daughters most people of that time and place would have called libertine (and only if they were being polite). But never mind. See writes with the force of gravity, and when the worlds she creates collide, the shock waves are enormous. Not only that, duty and tradition versus modernity and independence poses a crucial conflict, embodied in the sisters, so if their relative freedom seems a trifle convenient, See keeps returning to that struggle. Pearl feels that May is impetuous, selfish, self-centered, and brazen; May believes that Pearl is staid, masochistic, and too accepting by half. They’re jealous as hell of each other, and they’re both right.

But there’s a cultural context to every action or feeling, whether having to do with being female in a society that worships sons and despises daughters; having to obey a male authority, no matter who or how weak; and what money means. See spares no detail, sanitizing nothing, excusing nothing, and the cruelties of life are ever-present:

The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin writhing, pulsing, slithering. . . .Sampans—hung with ropes, laundry, and nets—cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.

Many horrors happen to the sister, involving violence, heartache, bigotry, and degradation, whether as women, as Chinese, or as the newly unfortunate. Throughout, See dwells on the sister bond in which love, jealousy, protectiveness, and resentment reside as uneasy partners. As such, the author explores, again with unflinching focus, what it means to be Chinese, and how Pearl and May struggle to reconcile what they want for themselves with what their culture demands, which in turn must be regulated because of public pressure and the threat of censure or disclosure. What a bold, searing depiction.

I have doubts about Pearl, particularly some of her doormat moments, which I’d think her experience might have led her to rise above, at least on occasion. That question arises most particularly because she’s astute enough to recognize how Chinese women know how to endure without falling apart, whereas men seem more fragile, having to spend so much energy shoring up their stoic facades. Why, then, doesn’t Pearl try to move beyond the role she’s accepted, at least outwardly?

But if that’s a weakness in Shanghai Girls, a necessity to maintain the sibling conflict throughout this narrative and the next—there’s a sequel—it’s a small price to pay. Shanghai Girls is a terrific novel, one that will stay with you.

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

Mission Improbable: Three Hours in Paris

05 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: Three Hours in Paris, by Cara Black
Soho, 2020. 360 pp. $17

One Sunday in late June 1940, Kate Rees parachutes from a British airplane into France and reaches Paris, a city she knows well from before the war, now barely weeks into the German Occupation. But this visit, she won’t be frequenting the cafés she recalls so fondly, or the booksellers by the Seine, places where her late husband courted her. Kate’s in Paris to shoot Hitler, because British Intelligence has decoded German wire traffic and learned he’ll be there.

A gripping premise, to be sure, and from first to last, Three Hours in Paris never lets up. I admire the storytelling, which lives inside a flashing sign that says, “no — and furthermore.” But I have to take issue with just about everything else, because if the breathless pace ever paused, the absurd circumstances defy belief.

This famous photograph, from June 23, 1940, records Hitler’s brief, only visit to Paris. Flanking him are (left) Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, and Arno Breker, an artist. (Courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; public domain in the United States)

Kate’s American, a neutral citizen in June 1940, which makes her a peculiar choice for such a mission. Though she’s a crack shot, having grown up on a ranch in Oregon, that’s her sole qualification, aside from her American-accented French. What’s more, her handlers somehow gloss over the eventuality that she might be caught, and for some reason, she doesn’t press them. That’s typical of her training, rudimentary and brief, and of the vague, amateurish atmosphere of British Intelligence, rather like a classroom that’s slipped the teacher’s control. (To be fair, this isn’t the famed Special Operations Executive, but its predecessor, known as Section D.)

The German side of this equation seems almost as absurd. We have Gunter Hoffman, a Munich homicide detective somehow working for the Reichsicherheitsdienst, or security service, assigned to track down who fired at Hitler. In a very tired trope, Hoffman doesn’t particularly care for the Führer; with so many novels about disaffected Germans, it’s a wonder the war ever happened. But that’s less the problem here than the overhyped interservice rivalries. Those add a few “no — and furthermores” for the detective to grapple with, improbable as they are.

As for Paris, the city seems wide open for business, an unusual situation for a Sunday, as any Francophile traveler knows. Finally, Kate’s mission quickly morphs into much bigger game, which ups the stakes, always a plus, but at further expense to credulity.

However, to her credit, Black manages to finesse a few of these clunkers, countering expectations. That’s where Three Hours in Paris does best; nothing is certain, ever, and Kate never knows whom to trust, if anybody. If the author has chosen an unlikely protagonist on an improbable mission, she makes up for that in part by wedging her heroine into a tight space and tightens it further without respite. Human laxity does Kate a favor, every now and again, but every time she slips through a net, she’s earned her escape with ingenious, on-the-spot thinking, and you know her respite will be temporary.

That’s Black’s payoff from deciding to use an untrained agent; everything’s a surprise, nothing has been planned. But Kate’s up against a crack detective in Hoffman, tireless, equally adept at quick thinking. It’s a pleasure following his reasoning, wondering how he’ll box Kate in; you have to admire his skill. Black’s known for her Aimée Leduc mysteries, set in Paris, and the author has police procedure and the city down pat; I’m sure she realizes her Sunday portrayal stretches the truth. If the military and espionage operations appear fuzzy, Paris comes in crystal clear:

She took a side street and familiar scents assailed her: the tangy odor from a green metal pissoir, a whiff of a woman’s perfume, the acrid smoke of a hand-rolled cigarette. Rapid-fire Parisian argot spilled out of a shop, now bearing signs of future rationing regulations, and onto the sidewalk. The conversation was punctuated by the snort of an ice wagon horse, the clatter of the wagon’s wheels and the clip-clop of hooves on the cobbles, the flower seller’s shouts. The Paris she knew, if more subdued.

You have to like the two main characters, though neither comes through with much depth. Emotional transitions happen in an eyeblink, and more than a few sentences in these passages restate the obvious. But if you read Three Hours in Paris, you’re reading for a high-octane plot, and in that, the novel delivers.

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

Rocket Terror: V2

22 Monday Feb 2021

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Review: V2, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2020. 312 pp. $29

In late November 1944, the Germans rain V2 rockets on London, killing hundreds of civilians, and destroy thousands of homes at supersonic speed. Once the rockets launch from the Dutch coast, they take mere minutes to cross the North Sea and land with no warning save for a last-second shift in air pressure. By that time, it’s too late to seek shelter. The V2, named for Vergeltung, meaning “retribution” or “payback,” is more terrifying and arbitrary than any weapon previously known.

One morning, Kay Caton-Walsh, a young officer in Britain’s women’s air service (WAAF) discovers this firsthand. Shacking up for the weekend with a high-ranking (and married) Air Ministry official, she’s lucky to survive a rocket attack, as is her lover. That gives her extra motivation, as if she needed any, to return to her work, which involves analyzing aerial photographs of potential launch sites. The RAF has tried many times to take them out but always fail. So the V2s keep coming, seemingly from nowhere, and entire blocks of London keep getting smashed. Kay would like to fight back more effectively — and when word comes of a mission to track them from Belgium, she persuades her lover to have her sent there.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rudi Graf, a rocketry expert and longtime colleague of Wernher von Braun, who runs the V2 program, prepares the missiles for launch in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen. He has little fear of the RAF, whose raids strike the town, surrounding area, or the seashore, never the launch sites. But he does fear the SS, which has strengthened its grip on every aspect of the war effort and looks over his shoulder constantly, sniffing for disloyalty or its perceived equivalent, lack of patriotic zeal.

Wernher von Braun, center, facing, wearing the Nazi Party lapel pin, talks to Fritz Todt, center, Peenemünde, March 1941. Todt’s slave laborers died by the thousands to build von Braun’s underground rocket works there (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And indeed, Graf is no zealot. He tries not to think about what the rockets he has developed actually do to London, or what that means. For the most part, he succeeds at putting action and effect in different compartments of his mind. But Braun originally recruited him to investigate the feasibility of space travel, and Graf can’t separate theory from practice or justify one to the other so easily. He wonders what he’s doing there.

The sixth Harris novel I’ve read, V2 feels the weakest. A few trademarks make their appearance, all right — a sure grasp of history, mastery of detail, physical descriptions. Wherever the narrative goes, Harris grounds you in the scene, whether a London street, a ministerial office, a launch site, or a brothel, all delivered with economy. Early on, for instance, you see how the war has completely changed Scheveningen:

Rain was gusting off the sea, funneled down the side streets between the abandoned hotels. The pier had burned down the previous year. Its blackened iron spars protruded above the running white-capped waves like the masts of the shipwreck. The beach was sown with barbed wire and tank traps. Outside the railway station a few tattered tourist posters from before the war showed a pair of elegant women in striped bathing costumes and cloche hats tossing a ball to one another.

However, unlike, say, An Officer and a Spy, The Second Sleep, or Dictator, the author focuses on public stakes almost to the exclusion of his characters, which results in a less thrilling thriller. By that, I mean plot points like a rocket launch or Kay’s analysis efforts provide most of the tension, fairly humdrum, with few “no — and furthermore” moments, because the characters’ inner lives fail to color the events or enlarge them in significance.

I really don’t care whom Kay sleeps with. Despite feminist overtones to the WAAF war contribution, she’s too much a sex object for my taste, and the love affair that gets her a much sought-after assignment feels contrived. On the other hand, I do want to know what about the rockets compels her; saying she wishes to do something important or useful doesn’t suffice. After all, the war affects every aspect of life, and there are many ways to serve.

Graf has a little more to him; you see the scientist trapped into serving weaponry, though it’s a trap he willingly entered. But, unlike the case with other Harris novels, I don’t see his deep passion or resistance. Mostly, he seems tired and wishes he could somehow take action, though in what way, he’s not sure.

If, however, you want to read a fast-moving outline of how the V2 rockets came to exist and how they worked, this book may satisfy you. You also see why Wernher von Braun deserved a war-crimes trial rather than a cushy job in America’s space program. But if you’ve never read a Robert Harris thriller, don’t start with this one.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, which shares its profits with independent bookstores.

Island Idyll: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

08 Monday Feb 2021

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Review: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
Random House/Dial, 2008. 290 pp. $17

Early 1946, Juliet Ashton, a British journalist and author of lighthearted essays, tires of her book tour and finds little inspiration in London, where (male) gossip columnists and pundits resent her success. She’s also looking for Mr. Right and, at age thirty-two, despairs of finding him — or even knowing who he’d be, if she tripped over him in broad daylight.

Intrigue comes via letter: A man on the island of Guernsey has acquired a book, second-hand, that once belonged to Juliet, who left her name and address inside the front cover. Since the Germans occupied the island during the recent war, no bookshops exist there any longer; and since he likes the book, selected essays by Charles Lamb, could Miss Ashton please give him the name of a London bookshop that could sell him more? And, by the way, she might like to know that, partly because of her old book, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into existence.

Girls evacuated from the Channel Islands in 1940 to Marple, Cheshire, try on clothes and shoes donated by America (courtesy Ministry of Information and Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, this piques Juliet’s interest, so she writes back, sparking an avid correspondence between the several members of the literary society and herself. Meanwhile, Juliet writes and receives other letters — from the publisher (also a friend), his sister (another friend), an obnoxious American who’s courting her, and other Guernsey residents who don’t belong to the literary society but have opinions about it, and the participants, they must share. Many of these acquaintanceships cross. To no surprise, Juliet comes to believe — hope — that her next book will revolve around the German occupation of the island.

I usually avoid epistolary novels, but this one manages to work, chiefly because the milk of human kindness runs like a river through its pages, and I enjoy the portraits of the island eccentrics. They have names like Isola and Dawsey, and there’s a fellow with a more commonplace moniker but singular taste — he’s read only one book in his life, by Marcus Aurelius, and his friends show great patience every time the society meets, when he lectures them about it.

Humor peppers the letters, as with Juliet’s publisher’s remark about her American suitor: “He’s all charm and oil, and he gets what he wants. It’s one of his few principles.” Or Juliet’s observation that, because Charles Lamb taught Leigh Hunt’s youngest daughter how to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, “You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that.”

You may have concluded by now that the authors have striven for an Austenesque touch, and you’d be right. (Austen’s books also make a cameo appearance.) As a series of vignettes about good-hearted characters, Guernsey succeeds, and though at times treacle threatens, the narrative mostly avoids that pitfall. If you’re looking for an edge, you won’t find it here, but there’s longing and pain to leaven the story.

Some epistolary novels suffer from contrivance, particularly the looseness with which the entries logically connect, but that doesn’t bother me here. If you read Guernsey, don’t expect high stakes or a gripping storyline; the significant questions are too mundane, as in, will Juliet find a writing subject for her book and, in the bargain, true love?

Nothing wrong with that, but we’re talking light entertainment, purely. Guernsey doesn’t take itself too seriously, and therein lies its charm. Perhaps because letters say only so much — or these letters do—I don’t find Juliet a full, memorable character, so her concerns don’t compel me. But they don’t have to; characters like Isola, who makes herbal potions that everyone politely avoids, dabbles in phrenology, and fashions herself a would-be Miss Marple, carry the load, such as it is. Unfortunately, the American suitor is a caricature of the rich, narcissistic male; his opposite, a central figure of island life deported by the Germans for wartime acts of resistance, reads more like an ideal than a real person. The minor characters, consequently, steal the show.

For the most part, Guernsey capably straddles that perilous territory between humor and hideousness, offering a glimpse of the Occupation, in seemingly different version from its Continental counterparts. Maybe the authors airbrush a few things, but in the main, I believe their account. I do wish they hadn’t introduced a French refugee incarcerated at Ravensbrück, who seems to need only a few months on the island, among new friends, to become whole enough to cope. Sure.

But these are quibbles. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society makes fun reading, a short, not-too-sweet tale of warmth and humor.

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