Rachel Cooke 

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer – review

Rachel Cooke enjoys Simon Mawer's follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted The Glass Room – the tale of a beautiful spy parachuted into occupied France
  
  

maquis
Heroes of the French resistance: Simon Mawer sets his latest novel among the men and women of the maquis. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Simon Mawer used to be what is known in publishing as a "mid-list author": well-regarded and well-reviewed but not, by any stretch of the imagination, big-selling. Then, in 2009, his eighth novel, The Glass Room, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. To anyone who had already read the book, this came as no surprise at all. The story of a young Jewish couple and the modernist house they build in pre-war Czechoslovakia (Mawer used as the model for their home Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno), The Glass Room is a superlative work of art: a novel replete with ideas that is also, thanks to a throbbing great engine of a plot, incredibly exciting and moving. Had he not been up against Hilary Mantel's mighty Wolf Hall, the prize would, I think, have been his for the taking.

But being shortlisted for a major award relatively late in one's career brings with it a piercing dilemma. What to do next? Should you write the book you want to write or should you try to hold on to all those lovely new readers? Mawer's new novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (published in the US as Trapeze), is, like its predecessor, set during the second world war, this time in Britain and occupied France.

Marian Sutro, a clever, cool-headed and bilingual young woman (her mother is French), has attracted the attention of the Special Operations Executive, and, following a series of oblique interviews in empty hotel rooms, volunteers for training. Taken to a remote hunting lodge in the Highlands – "a curious mix of military camp and university reading group" – she is taught how to send messages in code; to operate on enemy territory; to jump out of an aeroplane; to survive interrogation; and, most important of all, to kill. Marian does not exactly enjoy learning these skills; at times, she seems almost to sleepwalk her way through the course, for all that she is a brilliant student. But when, as it ends, she is told that she will indeed be employed in the field, she feels "a small snatch of emotion, a blend of fear and excitement from which it was impossible to recover either".

Soon after, she is parachuted into south-west France. She works with the Resistance and, though the men are beasts, always trying to get a look at her legs, life is surprisingly good: there is – miraculous, this, after the privations of Blighty – meat and eggs and cream. Then the call comes. She must make her way to Paris, a city that is hungry and battened down, and where the danger of discovery will be extreme. One of the circuits operating in the city has fallen apart, and she must take new radio crystals to its "pianist" (its radio operator), a nervy, emotional woman called Yvette whom she met during her training. But she has a side mission, too. Before the war Marian was in love with a young French scientist, a nuclear physicist called Clément, a man who is now of vital importance to her superiors. She must try to persuade Clément to join colleagues who have already fled to Britain and, if he agrees, she must somehow arrange his passage.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is a less capacious, less thoughtful book than The Glass Room, and some readers will find it – a thriller, I suppose – unsatisfying in the end. But who cares, really? It is so beautifully done.

I disliked Mawer's interest (it verges on a fixation) in Marian's genitals, and she would perhaps have been a more interesting heroine had she not been so predictably beautiful. But otherwise I cannot fault his story-telling; I read late into the night and cried a little when I was done. Mawer's wartime textures are extraordinary, and no page ever reeks of the library; his set pieces are so beautiful you want to read them two or three times over. He writes about fear – the way it sometimes nudges up against boredom – and about bravery better than any contemporary novelist I know; such is his precision, he seems more cartographer than novelist at times.

And then there is hope, which runs through this novel like a cold, fast-flowing river. "She wants to embrace it, or have it embrace her," he writes, as his heroine stands in a French field in dead of night, waiting for a British plane to make a drop. "She wants to have its power inhabit her body. She wants it more intensely than she has ever wanted anything… It is an experience, sliding overhead as loud as a train, a great thundering, magnificent call of defiance greater than any childish longing."

For Mawer, hope is as numinous as faith, and twice as powerful – and, like Marian, you apprehend its loss even as the strange ecstasy of it drives you on.

 

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