Tightrope

September 7, 2015
In the classical mode of a Graham Greene “entertainment,” Mawer’s (Trapeze) latest introduces the reader to Englishwoman Marian Sutro, who spent World War II as an SOE undercover agent in France, where she was betrayed, tortured by the Gestapo, and ultimately sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Repatriated to England at war’s end, Marian has a difficult time getting on with her life. Tortured by memories of her wartime experiences, she nevertheless marries and finds work as a librarian. But then a man from her past, Major Fawley, appears and asks her to spy for his secret organization. At the same time, she meets a Russian journalist, David Trofimovich Absolon, who turns out to be a GRU agent intending to blackmail her. She ends up walking a tightrope between both men. And then there is Sam Wareham, a younger man who has had a crush on Marian for years and will end up her confidante, lover, and maybe even her savior. Like le Carré, Mawer spins out Marian’s story in an immaculately methodical and suspenseful manner. And in Marian he has created a complex, contradictory heroine, emotionally fragile, endlessly resourceful, and unrepentantly amorous. If the novel is a little too long and too busy, it nevertheless tells a dramatic story about one woman testing the boundaries of loyalty as one kind of war gives way to a shadowy new one.

September 1, 2015
Mawer (Trapeze, 2012, etc.) dives into the hurricane of evil that was World War II and the Holocaust, examining the horror through Marian Sutro, an agent for Britain's Special Operations Executive whose life later becomes dezimformatsiya personified. As part of an underground resistance operation, Marian parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe. Soon her mission changed: get a physicist vital to atomic weapons research out of France. Then she was betrayed, captured, and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. The story is told through memories half a century later and is related by Sam Wareham, a family friend a decade Marian's junior who's always been enamored of the mysterious and sensual but broken woman. As the SOE is demobilized after the war, Marian is in limbo, physically debilitated, rotten with survivor's guilt, being debriefed by desk-jockey bureaucrats, her parents hovering. Within a mood-weather, vehicles, clandestine meetings-that resonates, Mawer's pacing is meticulous, detailed rather than slow, never frustrating or boring but rather creating an ominous atmosphere. Marian is drawn to "neither death nor life, but an existence between the two states," but soon, unknowingly, she's lured into "the spider's web of intrigue and betrayal" that is Cold War espionage. Marian remains war-fractured and mired in existential crisis, an "awful abyss of indifference," flitting from, or willingly seduced by, lovers with agendas. Mawer's minor characters linger in the memory, and as with many British writers, he laces the narrative with arcane references and language-benison, anfractuous-making for a fun, intelligent read. Very much in the vein of John le Carre-a damaged individual trapped in a complex and morally ambiguous international intrigue set on the stage of the early Cold War.

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September 15, 2015

This story rests in a frame: the narrator, a British Spec Ops agent, is called out of retirement to close the file on World War II heroine Marian Sutro, another operative, whom he's known and adored since childhood. Marian parachuted into France in 1943 on special assignment but was soon betrayed and suffered the horrors of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Cleverly, she escaped but once repatriated found adjustment nearly impossible and suffers anxiety, even fugue states. A job with a peace council helps--but the A-bomb changes everything. Marian is lured back into service by the enigmatic Major Fawley because her council draws some funding from the Soviets, and a Cold War thriller ensues. Marian is supposed to "turn" Soviet agent Absolon, but her physicist brother (along with many others) fears atomic weaponry in America's hands alone. She shares nuclear information (and a bed) with Absolon, and when he vanishes after the Soviets come after him, she's their next target. VERDICT Heroine/"traitor" Marian, introduced in Trapeze, is compelling and complicated. Even if the concept "cold war thriller" has been a bit overworked, the fast-paced, compelling narrative structure could almost be called "first-person-omniscient." Excellent for historical thriller readers and those interested in the dawn of the nuclear era. [See Prepub Alert, 6/21/15.]--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
In this outstanding sequel to Mawer's superb Trapeze (2013), we pick up the story of Marian Sutro, WWII British spy, after the war has ended, and she has been liberated from a German concentration camp. Gradually but inexorably, Marian is drawn into the game again, as the mysterious Major Frawley recruits her to turn a Russian spy whom she first encountered in Germany after the war. The Russian, meanwhile, is charged with blackmailing Marian into working for him. It is a classic Cold War situation, yet Mawer uses it for much more than espionage-driven suspense. Is Marian a British agent, a Russian double-agent, or is she pretending to be both while actually being neither, a woman, in other words, with no real identity, trolling for an elusive sense of self lost after too many years of tradecraft? And is her love affair with the Russian the real thinga way to break with the undercover worldor is it yet another illusion? That we see much of Marian's life through the eyes of a boy and then young man who idolizes and eventually falls in love with her gives Marian's story yet another level of tantalizing ambiguity. Like John le Carre's A Perfect Spy (1986), Mawer's novel offers a meditation on the problem of identity in a world where everything is cover for something else. A spy novel, yes, but one with the psychological richness and complexity of literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)