A propulsive novel of World War II espionage by the author of New York Times best seller The Glass Room.Barely out of school and doing her bit for the British war effort, Marian Sutro has one quality that makes her stand out—she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn … operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of nineteen, she finds herself undergoing commando training, attending a “school for spies,” and ultimately, one autumn night, parachuting into France from an RAF bomber to join the WORDSMITH resistance network.
But there’s more to Marian’s mission than meets the eye of her SOE controllers; her mission has been hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris and persuade a friend—a research physicist—to join the Allied war effort. The outcome could affect the whole course of the war.
A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, Trapeze is both an old-fashioned adventure story and a modern exploration of a young woman’s growth into adulthood. There is violence, and there is love. There is death and betrayal, deception and revelation. But above all there is Marian Sutro, an ordinary young woman who, like her real-life counterparts in the SOE, did the most extraordinary things at a time when the ordinary was not enough.
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Wow. This was my kind of spy novel! I loved Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Gray as well, and Trapeze reminds me a lot of that novel. A young Englishwoman is dropped into France during WW2 to work with the French Resistance. Both are dropped into the same general area in France. But there are differences. Marian Sutro in Trapeze is 20, innocent, inexperienced, but with a spine of steel. Charlotte was older, already a woman supporting herself, and had fallen in love with an RAF pilot who was shot down over France and she goes to find him. Marian is recruited because of her fluency in French and her background in and knowledge of France. Mawer spends time showing Marian’s training, revealing her attitudes and character along the way, and introducing her to people who will be important to her (and the story) in France.
Mawer does an excellent job of showing how Marian thinks so that her behavior emerges out of her thinking, her motivations, even when she’s unsure of her motivations. She possesses the attitude of invincibility of the young until faced with very real physical danger, and then she falls back on her training. Some of what she does is shocking, but under the circumstances of the story, not surprising. She has the intelligence and imagination to figure out how to elude a German barricade and German soldiers who are actually looking for her. It reminded me of my own research into disguise and how easy it is to change one’s appearance with only a few well chosen items. I found myself rooting for Marian even as I was thinking she was absolutely nuts.
It’s difficult to write about a spy story, a thriller, without giving fun details away. Suffice it to say that Mawer writes extremely well, prose that fits the story, metaphors that work, and pacing that had me wanting to read the book even when I was at work. He writes seemingly without favoring any one character over another, giving all of them flaws and strengths, and most of all, making huge mistakes. It’s a primary truth of espionage that the most effective spying is done by human beings, not technology, because they are spying on other human beings. Mawer understands this. He also captures Paris at the peak of WW2 when the Germans were everywhere in the city, the French were living on starvation rations, and endured many other deprivations. But out in the country, conditions were very different. People had enough to eat and the Germans weren’t everywhere. The French Resistance needed women to help them for many reasons, but primarily because women could get away with things a man could not while being watched by German soldiers. Mawer illustrates this also.
During WW2, about 3 dozen British women were dropped into France to aid the resistance in a variety of ways — as couriers, radio operators, operatives. About half were caught and killed. Knowing this up front only makes Marian Sutro’s story all the more suspenseful.
I loved this novel! I’d recommend it to readers who love spy fiction, historical fiction, WW2 fiction, or stories with strong female protagonists. I’m hoping that Mawer’s follow-up, Tightrope will complete Marian’s story.