It’s publication day

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Book Review, Publication Day, Simon Mawer, Tightrope

Today sees the UK publication of Simon Mawer’s thoughtful sequel to The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (published as Trapeze in the States) The sequel can be read as a stand-alone, for sure as Marian Sutro, his central character, does have some of her back-story revealed in Tightrope. The first book told the story of Special Operations Executives (SOE) parachuted into France to aid the Resistance in the Second World War. The war has ended, the Cold War is…hotting up, and Sutro is coming to terms with living in a much less adrenaline rush world,

Here is the original review I posted for Tightrope

Tightrope Amazon UK
Tightrope Amazon USA

Sorry Statesiders, I believe you may have some months to wait before the book reaches your shores

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Simon Mawer – Tightrope

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Book Review, Simon Mawer, The Cold War, Tightrope

From falling to balancing on an ever finer wire

When I finished Mawer’s last book, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, I felt shocked and almost a little bemused by the abrupt ending – though I also reflected that I had no idea what other ending might have been suitable. And I also found it a plus in that book that not every thread had been explained, not every character really revealed and understood.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was a fictional story, with an initial inspiration coming from the fact that during the Second World War, 39 women had been recruited as agents from England by SOE (Special Operations Executive) to be parachuted into occupied France, to work with the Resistance. What kind of people were these incredibly brave, but also, perhaps unusually addicted to the adrenaline rush, women? Mawer’s book centres on Marian Sutro, a naïve and adventurous young English woman with a Swiss French mother, brought up bilingual, recruited as an SOE agent, eagerly learning the arts of duplicity, subterfuge, living dangerously. Despite all the undoubted danger Sutro is also, in one sense, living free – escaping convention, escaping her family, her past, her history, inventing new identities – and living with a mission, making a difference.

When I realised that Mawer’s new book, Tightrope, would continue Sutro’s story, but would bring her into the period of the cold war, everything fell into place. And I had even more admiration for Mawer, because nothing about the first book, despite the advantage, now, of hindsight, screamed ‘sequel’. Sometimes books with sequels planned are highly unsatisfying BECAUSE they seem structured for book 2.

Tightrope is quite an uncomfortable book in many ways. How does someone who has lived in such an extraordinary way, with preternaturally sharpened senses, prepared to kill, prepared to lie, cheat, use sex casually and ruthlessly to relieve an overwhelming itch or as another tool of manipulation, then manage to live, after the war, back in suburbia, in a more narrowly confined way? That is Mawer’s exploration, and Sutro’s challenging journey.

Mawer gives us a world with a character who is always going to be, a naturally unreliable narrator. Actually, the reader can probably be a lot more sure of Sutro than anyone else within the book can be!

Did I believe the story she told me? I really don’t know. It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time – that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind. Without it we’d have no war and no religion and precious little else that separates us from the other species.

As a cavil, I wasn’t completely sure about some of Sutro’s sexual encounters, and at times, I was very aware that the writer was male, and wondered how differently a female writer might have explored writing a woman who uses sex without intimacy, in part because of the professional need to hide vulnerability, – which of course includes becoming emotionally intimate – and who also uses sex as an escape from some of the horrors of her past experiences, and as an escape from the humdrum. It wasn’t the fact of Sutro’s sexuality which I was ‘unsure’ about, or even her degree of distance, but (perhaps inevitably) I was aware of the gender of the writer. The sex scenes take place in many ways quite clinically, from the outside, and were where I could not quite engage with the inner world of what Sutro was feeling – I think a female writer may have given a little more insight into Sutro’s emotional responses here.

Nonetheless, I found this a completely absorbing, dislocating, sometimes frightening book. The structure is clever, we learn her story backwards and forwards, and it is partly narrated by Sam Wareham, who initially meets Marian when she is 24 and he is 12. Sam is the son of a family friend, and as the story proceeds into the 50s, and he becomes a young man, from time to time his story connects with Marian. The edgy, shifting politics, as the countries who were Allies during the war shift, split, and take up new positions relative to each other, and the very real spectre of a nuclear arms race gallops apace, from the first horrific atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the race for a thermonuclear device, the hydrogen bomb. Sutro is still at the heart of all this, as her brother, and also the man she first fell in love with, as a sheltered teenager before the war, both became physicists, working on nuclear fission and fusion.

The Official CTBTO Photostream “Ivy Mike” detonation, Wiki Commons

On the desert island, the device called Ivy Mike detonated. A double flash, the flash of the primary followed microseconds later by the flash of the secondary. The primary was a plutonium bomb of the Nagasaki type, releasing a storm of X-rays that flowed down into the secondary and impacted upon the hydrogen atoms in the vacuum flask so fiercely that they fused into helium and, for a fragment of time, into all the atoms of creation and a few more besides……..The island on which the device had been constructed vanished entirely. The thermonuclear age had begun.

I was left with perhaps a clearer understanding of why some ‘real’ individuals may have acted in certain ways which seemed incomprehensible or motivated solely by motives of personal gain or a kind of emotional pathology. Without preaching, or indeed special pleading, Mawer makes the reader examine the moral maze of the times.

And, for what it’s worth, the ending of this book is wonderfully satisfying. Mawer brings in, in both books, the idea of a rather fiendish chess game variant, where you only see your own pieces on your own board, and can’t see the moves your opponent is playing – this becomes a kind of metaphor for Marian, as she begins to be drawn into still deadly games in a world ostensibly at peace. And, yes, Mawer too is playing that game, and the end, where he finally shows us the board with all its pieces, the game across two books, is brilliant, and I laughed in delight and admiration.

I received this as an ARC from the publishers, Little Brown, via Netgalley. UK publication is on June 4th, but ALAS Statesiders, I’ve had an email from the publishers to say you will have to wait until November 3rd. Isn’t that CRUEL. I suggest booking a holiday next month in the UK and making the nearest decent bookshop a first item on your tour. Otherwise, i suppose there is ordering from the UK, or calling in favours from your UK resident family or friends

Tightrope Amazon UK
Tightrope Amazon USA

Simon Mawer – The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

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Book Review, Literary Fiction, Second World War, Simon Mawer, SOE, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

39 women were SOE agents in France during WW2. They were all remarkable

At the beginning of this book Mawer tells us, that of the group of people who came under the aegis of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the last war, and became undercover agents in occupied France, working with the resistance, 39 were women.

12 of these 39 were captured and killed, one died of an ilness, and the other 26 survived the war. Some became known through books and films which told their stories, some remain anonymous. And, Mawer’s final sentence in this Foreword. ‘They were all remarkable’

Well, of course. It takes, we must imagine, a very unusual and special sort of person indeed to possess the skills, the mind, the heart, the guts, the integrity, courage, ruthlessness, commitment – and of course the ability to handle the unremitting danger and vigilance, duplicity and guile to lead this life.

Here is the imagined story of one such, and being Mawer, I expected that there would be a cracking skilled narrative, that there would be finely and well drawn characters, major and minor, that there would be the skilled craft of writing itself, and that there would be philosophical conundrums which would nudge, tease and batter away at me as i read the novel, and afterwards.

All this is there, and Mawer did not disappoint, in any way. I had the curious sensation, from the very start of the book that I was completely safe, and could surrender to Mawer, knowing once again I was reading a very good book, by a good writer, and would not be constantly pulled out of the act of reading by poor use of language itself, sloppy unreal characterisation or implausible plotting. So – safe as a reader, reading a book which does everything to make the reader feel constantly unsafe, constantly anxious, constantly confused, constantly with no real hold on safe reality, or of self-identity. In other words, the reader surrenders to the central character, and the shifting world of her many identities.

Mawer keeps the unpredictability of the narrative – what WILL happen next, who IS this person, really, right up to the final abrupt ending. Which I am still thinking about. Is this the right ending for the book? Indeed, can there be? Several questions are raised, and Mawer does not answer them – and actually, this is part of his skill and confidence as a writer, the ability to leave certain questions a dangle. There is, for example, one particularly shadowy character whose role is never explained – and that is exactly what life is like, not every person within our lives actually HAS a role within it, yet, an outside observer, trying to write our narratives, might assume that a person on the periphery is more central, or assume a figure which is central is peripheral. It is all part of the uncertain, shifting, not to be trusted or taken for granted place that the narrative of this book inhabits

Photograph of Monument to Violette Szabo, Wikimedia Commons

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky Amazon UK
The Girl Who Fell From The Sky Amazon USA

Simon Mawer – The Glass Room

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Book Review, Literary Fiction, Second World War, Simon Mawer, The Glass Room

Disciplined, deeply tender, and without self-indulgence

The Glass Room is about a real house,about real history, spans just over 60 years (1929-1990) and documents some of the events that happened in Czechoslovakia in that time, a troubled, short lived country, created from the dissolution of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Czechoslovakia was a proud, independent, liberal democracy from 1918-1938; the German invasion, later followed by Soviet Occupation, meant that her peoples experienced shattering and tragic events.

Mawer sensitively and imaginatively charts those times through the history of a partly fictionalised group of people who commissioned, designed and built, lived in or worked in the house over that 70 year period

The real glass house and the real people who fuelled Mawer’s creative telling of this story was the Villa Tugendhat in Brno designed by Mies van der Rohe

Just like the seemingly impossible house itself, with its audacious materials, structures and concepts, Mawer’s book seethes with the energy of contradictions, beautifully held and contained. There are violent passions, ethical conflicts, tragic loss, betrayals, deep friendships and loves, all thrown up and borne along by the inevitable march of the history of nations.

Mawer skilfully avoids polemic and an intrusive voice. He doesn’t overwhelm the reader with obvious poetic or literary style; the twisting strands of story unfold and the reader has the sense of looking, as if through that great glass wall, into the room of time and space.

I wept reading this book – but without any sense of being ‘manipulated’ to do so, by the writer. He USES his skills rather than displays them.

I’m just a little astonished that I somehow missed this extraordinary writer until this, his eigthth book. While many, many lesser writers are hyped up to the heavens, perhaps the often ill-awarded superlatives has meant that when superlatives may be deserved (as here) they are no longer noticed.
The Glass Room