17 Jun 2013 05:01:05
Though Simon Mawer's latest novel shares its wartime setting with its Booker-shortlisted predecessor, The Glass Room, it's a different animal, swapping the elegant historical sweep of that book for something more streamlined and tautly paced. This is much more of traditional thriller, albeit an intelligent one. We're in Eric Ambler territory here, though William Boyd's Restless also comes to mind.
Marian Sutro is a smart, composed young woman of French and English parentage who is recruited by the Special Operations Executive, via a series of elliptical meetings in hotel rooms, to be trained in the arts of espionage. Her bilingualism is deemed an asset, as is the fact that she is neither one thing nor the other.
Marian proves to be a good student, taking pleasure in her Highland training as she learns Morse code, how to cope when under aggressive interrogation and how and where to plunge a knife in order to kill a man. Parachuted into south-west France, she lives a life of curious comfort for a while – unlike in Britain, they have meat and real coffee – but all too soon she is obliged to embark on a dangerous mission to Paris delivering radio crystals to another agent while tracking down a former flame, now a notable scientist. The prospect of exposure dogs her every move and Mawer manages to evoke a keen sense of place and time while always keeping the pace brisk, the underlying tension high.
Marian is given many names over the course of the novel: Anne-Marie, Marianne, and Alice, code names, aliases, looking-glass versions of herself. The real "Marian" begins to get a little lost, though given how difficult it is for her to trust anyone other than herself, there's a sense of necessity to this.
