Down the rabbit hole

In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During her training a woman had told the young, bilingual agent, ‘We girls have an advantage over the men. We can always carry items – messages and the like – where no gentleman will ever see them. You might call it inside information.’ Heeding her advice, the spy (Marian is her natural name) takes a pair of radio crystals, wraps them in a condom, and buries the package inside herself. She’s good to go.

Mawer is a masterful storyteller. He knows exactly when to quicken the pace, exactly when to suspend the critical moment.