Trapeze

by Simon Mawer

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 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.

• ISBN10: 1299568920
• ISBN13: 9781299568921
• Publish Date: 1 January 2012
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 14 April 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Other Press (NY)
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[viking2917]

I’ve read all the espionage masters — Le Carré, Greene, Littell — but don’t remember ever reading a book with a female spy as the lead. When I encountered The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, with a cover blurb from Alan Massie that said “As good as le Carré”, I had to try it.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky on The Hawaii Project

Marian Sutro is a young woman, half British and half French, with a command of French, a taste for adventure, and a restlessness that makes her jump at a chance for an unspecified, clandestine opportunity to help Britain in the war (World War II). Before she knows it she is in training as a spy, jumping out of airplanes, and exploring her first fumbling experiences of sex. And Marian turns out to have a taste and a talent for firearms.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is much more in the vein of Alan Furst than Le Carré. There’s little in the way of the moral ambiguity or the creeping sense that there aren’t any good guys or bad guys, just shades of grey, the calling card of Le Carré. Rather, this is WWII and the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good, if a bit unfussy about methods. The first half of the book is leisurely — it’s not until halfway through that Marian finally graduates from training and does a parachute jump into the French countryside. There are a lot of atmospherics, which makes one think of Furst, capturing the sense of wartime, even as events themselves move slowly. But the second half of the book accelerates, the tension rises, and Marian’s recklessness increases. The rendering of a female spy who is reckless to the point of irrationality, but is still a believable character, is something unique I don’t think I’ve encountered in the dozens of espionage novels I’ve read.

I really enjoyed this book (although “as good as Le Carré” is over stating things) — I’m very much looking forward to Tightrope, the sequel.

(Note: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky was published in the UK; it appeared in the US under the title Trapeze — not sure why they ditched such an awesome title).