Eric Larson's The Splendid and the Vile review

 

Larson Eric The Splendid and the Vile

“Mammoth” is a word that defines anything written about Winston Churchill. Everything about the man is more than life-size and the bibliography expands to fit his personality and accomplishments. Eric Larson with  The Splendid and the Vile  joins the list of eminent writers who have tackled the Churchillian mountain. The book’s five hundred closely packed pages covers only the critical period between his election as Prime Minister through to the war’s end. It differs from a standard military battle history because it tends to  concentrate on the man, his family, his inner circle, and the people who endured the horrors of the Blitz with him.   

A good deal of this retelling is not pleasant. You must endure the destruction of Coventry, Plymouth, and London in excruciating detail. On one of Churchill’s now legendary excursions into the smoldering wreckage of London, Larson reports he asks a small boy what he wants to be when he grows up. The boy responds with a depth beyond his years, “Alive!”

That may illustrate the “vile” of the title, but there is plenty of time devoted to the splendid too. We have detailed reconstructions of the composition  and delivery of some of his now famous speeches to Parliament and humanizing glimpses of the man in his bathtub puffing on a big cigar while dictating messages. One humorous quote was from a young woman who feared she would die a virgin if she didn’t have sex with her boy friend.  Her diary records "If that's really all there is to it, I'd rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures."  

Even more interesting are detailed accounts of Churchill’s family life. We get to peer into his relationship with his wife, Clementine, his young daughter, Mary, and the roving eye of his son Randolph’s wife, Pamela.

Finally there are many portraits of the political figures and aides who surrounded the great man. My own knowledge expanded as I learned more about people like Lord Beaverbrook, his airplane construction tsar, Jock Colville, his administrative assistant, Professor Lindemann, the armament guru, and Inspector Thompson the sole detective who was his constant bodyguard.

By and large the book reads as smoothly as a novel. The pictures emerge through evocative descriptions. One example I recall came in another of Churchill’s many walks to survey bomb damage. Larson says, “In his long overcoat over his round form, he looked like the top half of a very large bomb.” Only occasionally are we bogged down in too much detail. The main item I recall in this vein was a full page devoted to a list of drug supplies that the hypochondriac Rudolf Hess packed in a suitcase when he flew into England toward the end of the war.

Anyone with a penchant for WWII biography will find this book fulfilling. Churchill the man was often erratic and sometimes  downright weird, but there is no question that he was  “Splendid.”

A final suggestion. If you have never been to London, do not miss the experience of touring the Admiralty War Rooms where a lot of  this book takes place. It is now a splendid museum.

Another light summer theatrical read.

 

Rutherford,Anne  The Opening Night Murder
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was built in 1599, burned down in 1613, was rebuilt and reopened in 1614, operated until the closure of all theatres in 1642, and was demolished in 1644. Anne Rutherford’s 2012 historical mystery, The Opening Night Murder, posits that the Globe actually stood vacant until the Restoration in 1660 and was reopened by a former kept woman and her son who was fathered by a Royalist nobleman. Suzanne Thornton is the doxy turned impresario and all is going well until a body drops out of the heavens at their opening performance of Henry V. As luck would have it, the fresh corpse turns out to be the fearful Puritan who kept Suzanne during Cromwell’s reign. 

While the box office receipts remain strong our fiercely independent heroine must find the real killer to keep her own son from the gallows. The theatrical atmosphere was over-shadowed somewhat by Suzanne’s on again off again longing for the thoroughly unlikable Earl who fathered her son and now has returned to London with Charles II the new King. 

Another plot limitation is that the denouement, though exciting, strains credibility.  But on the plus side the period detail is vibrant and the feminist leanings in the character of Suzanne Thornton could be explored in further books capitalizing on the introduction of women as performers on the Restoration stage.

Let’s give it a three out of five stars.   

Review of THE GEOMETRY OF HOLDING HANDS

 

Alexander McCall Smith  

The Geometry of Holding Hands 

Here we go with the umpteenth in the series of Elizabeth Dalhousie books by what must be one of the most prolific authors ever to grace the veldts of Africa or the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. You know you are in the presence of a Renaissance mind when you run into references to Daniel Barenboim, Bertolt Brecht, Petronius, Ovid, Plato, Aristotle, Moliere, Hoarce, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten , and petri dishes all in the first four pages of a novel.

Let’s face it. Ms. Dalhousie is as far away from Mma. Ramotswe, the stalwart operator of Botswana't No.1 Ladies Detective Agency as can be.   Mma. Ramotswe is a woman of comfortable size married to an auto mechanic who has great intelligence and love for others but little formal education. Isabel Dalhousie is a wealthy, art loving, highly educated, urban dweller whose husband is a professional bassoonist.  She publishes an academic journal devoted to exploring the finer points of philosophy and ethics while also spending a good deal of time assisting in the operation of her niece's delicatessen. . Though separated by both geography and social class, both women do exhibit similar characteristics. They love helping people and have a difficult time turning any request down. Isabel, in particular, seems to dwell so intensely on the moral significance of simple daily interactions that she is constantly getting into tricky situations that highlight her inability to say no to almost any request.

In this outing McCall Smith has Isabel and Jamie, her musician husband, dealing with two major threads that center around this inability. First, Isabel is approached by a stranger suffering from a terminal illness who asks her to serve as the executor of his will.  She has severe doubts but accepts and then has to deal with how she will decide who of three relatives will get how much of the man’s considerable assets. The second plot knot is more familial. It involves Cat, Isabel’s niece and delicatessen proprietor,  who has become engaged to a man who has some dubious character traits. This involves considerable philosophic discussion that seems to be best summarized by Isabel’s conclusion that difficult people get away with a lot because one never quite knows where to start in saying “no” to them.  Ultimately both of the central issues come down to tough decisions about the distribution of money.  I must admit that I  kept wondering how the problems would be solved if a considerable fortune had not been at hand to put salve on the emotional distress in both cases.    

All told, not my favorite McCall Smith book, but still thought provoking and pleasantly humorous. One minor event that stood out was the funny scene in a fancy Edinburgh restaurant where the waiter warns Isabel and Jamie off certain menu items. This fosters an ethical consideration as to whether it is appropriate for a waiter to do such a thing and does it mean he really hates his job and might be likely to spit in the soup before serving it.  

As is often the case with McCall Smith, a final coda ties the title to the major story lines and we end with a scene of peace and love.  Brother Fox also continues to pad through the garden on occasion. 

  

The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny

A Review of Louise Penny's The Nature of the Beast

Methinks I am suffering from Three Pines fatigue. I have just finished a catch up read of The Nature of the Beast in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. We are focused once again in that weird little Brigadoon hamlet that seems to harbor more than its share of Freddie Kruegers. Even though Ms. Penny notes at the end of the book that Gerald Bull was a real human being and a real armament designer, I found her fictional plot elaborations made things less rather than more convincing. 

We must accept once again that the forest surrounding Three Pines is so dark and impenetrable that hermits’s cabins or a massive artillery piece (even if covered by camouflage) could remain unknown for more than twenty years. In this case the hidden gun is in a spot easily reachable by a small boy exploring the forest a veritable stone’s throw from his own backyard. You must also accept that the search for this gun has kept several lay people and several governments in a frenzy for years. Then you have to believe that all of this is somehow connected to an incarcerated serial killer cum playwright who has managed to write a producible work that also offers hidden clues to the whereabouts of the plans for the nasty gun. Luckily Inpector Gamache has been at the secret trial of this killer and just happens now to be retired to Three Pines where he has taken a liking to the small boy who is later killed after discovering the hidden monstrous weapon. 

Enough! Nice try Louise, but I just can’t buy it and though the familiar characters are still sitting on benches around the green, still meeting at the Bistro, still having artistic blocks, and still eating scrumptious gourmet meals, it just doesn’t compute.   

Maybe after a break I’ll return to continue my progress in reading all of the Gamache novels.  

An American Quilt by Rachel May 2018 Book Review

An American Quilt by Rachel May 2018

Have you had difficulty in processing the words “systemic racism”?  Did your schooling  teach that slavery was basically something  practiced by Southerners?  If so, you may need to read Rachel May’s An American Quilt.

It is not an easy or quick read, but it is packed with content that may help you adjust your thinking about racial issues in our country.  It took May years to pursue her investigations and after that there was still the work of developing a strategy for communicating both the history and the partly imagined stories of enslavement.

The emotional thread of the book is carried by the author’s discovery of a group  of unfinished quilt tops, their paper patterns, and a cache of saved letters. That the quilt tops were never sewn together makes the unfinished quilt a powerful  metaphor for our country’s racial history. We are all still in the process of working toward “a more perfect union.”

The family she highlights had both Southern and Northern roots. The key marriage involves a woman(Susan Williams) from the North and a man from the South (Hasell Crouch).  Susan’s new husband holds inherited enslaved people as domestic staff and as she tries to rise in Charleston SC society, she shows an easy adaptation to this situation.  The enslaved people (Minerva, Eliza, Jane, and Juba), whose history is little more than their first names, become the threads that Ms. Day has to basically re-create.  Given the paucity of records for people of color, she must depend on casual comments in the old letters of white masters, a few bills of sale that document the transfer of the enslaved to other owners, and the generally available historical record.  

You will note in the preceding paragraph that I use the term “enslaved people” to refer to what many of us were taught to call “slaves.” Ms. Law argues that we must revise our language in order to begin revising our imprinted white supremacy.  Using the term “enslaved peoples” imparts to these departed souls some of the recognition they were denied during their lives.  They were real people.  The difference was that the whites thought that black and brown people were essentially sub-human. Thus it was easy to treat them as objects that could be bought, sold, abused, or bequeathed.  This is a real life example of what is known in communication theory as the Sapir-Whorf  Hypothesis, which claims that the way a speaker structures language and uses or speaks words affects that speaker’s own understanding of the world.  i.e.your perceptions are partly controlled by the spoken language you use.  Add to this the brutal treatment of  enslaved  peoples and the all too common sexual abuse of  females by their masters and you have a crazy quilt indeed. 

One of many historical tidbits that I was unaware of was that women of color were identified by their main farming occupation and often called  “hoes. “ That is, according to the author, the derivation of the word “whore.”

While developing her story of the personal lives of enslaved people and their masters, May also weaves another thematic thread. She effectively rebuts the long lasting white perception that slavery, racism, and trafficking were mainly confined to the South.  She documents the interconnections that the families and the owners of the Northern fabric mills, the Northern distilleries, the Southern plantations, and the ships that trafficked slaves and goods were participating in.  She demonstrates that a large proportion of our young country’s growing economic wealth was dependant on the labor of enslaved people. The trade in human lives produced “an endless cycle that bound North and South” and made the North just as culpable for slavery as the South.  As May finally said  “No one was clean of slavery.”

My admittedly minor caveats to all this is that the book is 400 pages of small print with a lot of less than well printed illustrations. There was a little too much detail on sewing, fabric, and quilt making for me, but for someone with an abiding interest in those items that would not be a negative.  I also found it a challenge to process the constant time jumps back and forth. The shifts too often included repetitions of material that had already been treated.  Thus I do think the enterprise could have profited from a firmer editorial hand.  

In spite of these concerns, I learned some new things and was reminded of some things that I had forgotten.  I am definitely the better for reading this book and will never again use the term “slave” when I can say “enslaved people”.

Book Review Hell and Other Destinations

Hell and Other Destinations by Madeleine Albright is occasionally a heavy lift, but it is more often funny, acerbic, and thought provoking,  Her humor is wry and sneaky.  When she was told by another woman how brave she was for not getting a facelift, she admitted that she was tempted to respond to the courage the woman had shown in dealing with the results of hers.

And that’s how it goes. In the chapter on her family and friends we find that they all were educated and did well,  particularly in helping professions like the law and international children's assistance.  Education was her passport to a full life and she has passed her support for it on to her children and to the minions of countries around the world. Her father was a well known college professor and fled from Prague with his family just prior to WWII. One saying of his she remembers was “There is nothing better than to be a professor in a free country.”   She says that her father felt that the professorial life, because of all the time spent in preparation, was a solitary profession at heart.  Yet the rewards came from constant exposure to young minds, interchange with “mostly amiable” colleagues,  and a campus environment that was exciting and frustrating in somewhat equal measure.  Having spent my own life as a student and teacher on many campuses, I could not agree more. Albright continued to teach throughout her government career and another thing I agree with her about is that due dates are important.  In real life, she says, a decision memo or paper that arrives too late  “is as useless as a screen window on a submarine.”  Or as I have often said to generations of students, "Showing up is half the battle."

Midway in the book I was starting to bog down a bit, but when she began to relate the  discovery of  her Jewish heritage,  my interest returned.   

She was only five when her father escaped from Czechoslovakia with his family just ahead of the Nazi crackdown on the Jews.  She discovered much later in her life that  her grandparents and other members of her family did not. Instead many of them were shipped off to Terezin from Prague.

Five years ago my wife and  I visited Terezin and it was one of the most moving experiences of our lives. Terezine was not an extermination camp but essentially a prison where many died and many thousands more were sent on to Auschwitz. The rows of graves and cells are more than enough to bring the most jaded to tears. 

One of Albright’s relatives who did not survive was a young girl who actually did some of the extraordinary heart wrenching drawings we saw in the town’s Holocaust Museum and were later memorialized in the beautiful book titled I Never Saw Another Butterly.  You can still get a copy. https://www.amazon.com/Never-Saw-Another-Butterfly-Concentration/dp/0805210156

Albright knew the great Holocaust communicator Elie Wiesel and cited his famous admonition “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” in her book.

With interest rejuvenated,  I tackled the chapters dealing with her relationship with Vaclav Havel, the renowned playwright and later president of the new Czech Republic.  Her personal recollections covered  both his life as an artist and political figure.  It drew me back into my own connection with Havel.  The last play I directed in the Little Theatre at Monmouth College some twenty years ago was his compelling  work The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.  

Albright's final chapters tend toward philosophical reflection on governance and statesmanship. She said that she often answers questions by first saying the issue is complicated.  That, she continues, is because most important issues are complicated and if they were simple they would already have been solved.   

She muses on how even the passage of small amounts of time weakens memory.  The young, she said,  can’t conceive of a system worse than the one they are experiencing.  “Lacking patience, they underestimate the difficulty of governing, and are quick to find fault when their needs are not swiftly gratified.”  The gap between desire and reality produces a situation that no government  can fix on a dime and thus we are hammered simultaneously by the sometimes violent pressure to produce change quickly while also yearning for a world that feels stable and familiar.  This thought certainly resonates now.  

If you do need a dose of optimism, you can find it as she closes. She still feels there are enough people. both young and old, who believe that we cannot stay much longer on the present course without doing lasting harm to our country. The final thought comes from Joseph Lowery’s rainbow benediction at Barack Obama’s inauguration in January of 2009.  

 ”Help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; and when the white will embrace what is right."  

"Amen."

Alexander McCall Smith The Talented Mr. Varg

McCall Smith, Alexander  The Talented Mr. Varg

Alexander McCall Smith’s high volume of work often makes me think of frothy foam on the top of a cappuccino.  There is flavor there, but you need to dive beneath the foam to find the real essence of the drink.  McCall Smith is the ultimate cultural chameleon and most impressively seems to be as much at home writing about southern Sweden as he is about  Edinburgh or the African veldt.  

I quickly discovered  that the Varg books have been dubbed “Scand-blanc” because they take the dark and violent novels of  Henning Mankell,  creator of Wallander or Stieg Larsson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and turns them on their head.  Detective Ulf Varg is a man , to keep the metaphor going, who seems to be measuring out his life in coffee spoons.  He is a Swedish policeman who works in  a unit called the Department of Sensitive Crimes.  The paradox is that the team concentrates on things that are so tiny, so problematic, or so lacking in sensitivity that they appear to have no reason to be investigated at all.  

The personnel in the station appear to be castoffs who have been found to be lacking real police chops. They spend most of their time navigating a bureaucracy devoted to obscuring procedures and creating endless reports. In one recurring episode they receive a directive to only order needed supplies by number.  However,  no numbers are included to attach to the supplies requested.  Further pleas allow them to discover that the number list is only available to people above their pay scale.  In that sense the office also seems to resemble the so called “Peculiar Crimes” unit created by mystery writer Christopher Fowler.  In his books  Detectives Bryant and May are packed full of amusing  British eccentricities.  In the Varg series the hero is just a guy who is dull and normal to the point of boredom.

We finally arrive at the unassuming plot.  Like the man and the department he works for, it is wispy almost to the point of non-existence.  A benevolent author who is trying to maintain an alternate personality for the public may be the victim of blackmail.  Anne, one of Ulf Varg’s  co-workers is a woman he has always had a secret crush on and she brings a personal problem to her superior. She thinks her husband is having an affair and wants Ulf to investigate if it is true.  Ulf determines that her husband had had an affair but it has now ended.  Therefore he can honestly answer Anne’s question by saying that her husband isn’t having an affair.  If it doesn’t sound like much, it isn’t.  

Life in flat and relaxed Malmo goes on. Not much happens, nobody much cares, tomorrow is another day.  Yet there is so much pleasantly droll wordplay going on that the book remains a good natured and interesting read. Call it an anecdote if you will to all the blood, guts, and sex detective novels of the past.  The crimes turn out to be semi-real and the cases get solved by twisting the law a bit to allow for second chances or forgiveness.

To top it off we hear about political parties like the “Moderate Extremists” and the “Left Centrists.”  I shall leave you with this bit of the book’s wisdom from below the cappuccino’s foam .  So says Detective Ulf Varg,   “Everybody’s under pressure to do something these days.  If you don’t do something you’ll be accused of doing nothing.” 

Book Revuew Louise Penny The Beautiful Mystery

Penny, Louise  The Beautiful Mystery  2012  Book 8 in series

“Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?´ is a quote from T.S. Elliot’s Murder in the Cathedral that keeps coming up in Louise Penny’s eighth book in her Inspector Gamache series.  Each time it is mentioned it helps to highlight grave internal decisions faced by the characters.  

The setting is not in Three Pines this time and it inserts Gamache and his assistant Jean Guy Beauvoir deep into the Quebec’s wilderness where a group of cloistered monks are facing the apparent murder of their own choir director. Once the detectives are on the scene, it becomes apparent that brotherly rifts have been simmering for some time over whether the order ought to issue a second CD of Gregorian Chants  to capitalize on a wildly successful first one. The money earned had enabled the completion of some major repairs to their buildings, but it had been at a cost of allowing the modern world and modern temptations to enter their peaceful seclusion and reduce their concentration on their music and their faith.   

Surrounding this central plot is the all-enveloping presence of Gregorian Chant as an accompaniment to the daily monastery rituals of worship. Penny displays a wealth of  research and love for music on almost every page. We learn a lot about the history of the Gregorian chant, the sounds of various chants, and their impact on the psyches of both the singers and their listeners. 

The chosen setting also lends itself to the emotional pressure cooker of the classic  whodunit.  Agatha Christie would definitely approve of a murder in a walled  monastery  located off the grid on the shores of a cold lake surrounded by deep forests and swirling mists. Access is only by boat or seaplane. The 24 resident monks, supposedly dedicated to Christian love and service, are then confronted with the unpleasant knowledge that one of their sequestered brethren is a violent killer.     

To complicate things further Gamache and Jean Guy bring with them their own demons. They are both still suffering from the horrors of the disastrous factory shootout that resulted in the deaths of several young officers and seriously injured both of them.  Their guilt rushes even closer to the surface when Inspector Francoeur, Gamache’s superior. swoops in like a giant bird of prey to stir an already boiling pot.

This allows Penny to zero in on questions of responsibility and guilt. Why must there be guilt? Who is to blame for the outcome? Must there always be blame? If so is it singular or plural?  The chapter ends with Gamache thinking about the monestery’s own patron Saint (Saint Gilbert), who had taken sides in King Henry’s dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury long years ago. Gamache asks himself, if it is ever right to kill or hurt one for the sake of the many? This impacts the murder at the monastery as well as his own pending conflict with Jean Guy and the even more nasty conflict with his superior. Penny seems to answer with a biblical quote--Matthew 10:36--  “And a man’s foes, shall they be of his own household?” This clearly cuts several ways and adds to the moral complexities that Ms. Penny delivers. 

I found this book a bit chillier than some of her earlier offerings. I do kind of miss some of the warmth and humor that creeps into those that are set in Three Pines. There is no monk who can hold a candle to Ruth Zardo and her acerbic comments or her pet duck. Some other minor quibbles would be that It was a bit much to see the big boss Francoeur make such a long and hard trip just to prosecute his feud with Gamache.  It also took some suspension of disbelief to accept that the monks had been out recruiting singers of supreme quality for over two hundred years and yet remained secret and basically unknown until the murder.  Finally the late appearance of the Inquisition all the way from Rome was definitely a step too far. Three arrivals at  this remote place in twenty four hours does test credibility. I’m afraid I was reminded more of Monty Python when he showed up.  

I give it a 3 and move on to the next one.

Book Review: A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny 2011

A Trick of the Light is pretty traditional Louise Penny.  The plot centers around Clara, who has finally struck it rich in the art world and secured a major one woman show, only to discover on the night of her celebratory party that there is a body in her garden. Inspector Gamache rides to the rescue again in Three Pines-- a community that seems attract murders and murderers like a super magnet going after iron filings. 

Chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark in Clara's in Clara’s portrait of Ruth Yardo is the philosophical hinge that stitches together the various plot lines.   We have artists striving for notice and fame. We have venal agents and gallery owners fighting to represent them. We have recovering alcoholics littering the landscape. And finally we have Gamache and Jean Guy still suffering from the darkness of their various guilts over the horrid factory shooting that ended with Gamach and Jean Guy wounded and four Surete agents killed. Amidst all this sadness the question continues to be Is there hope at the end of evil or is their always evil lingering at the bottom of hope? 

I am not sure why I did not find all this compelling. Maybe all this talk about artists and their egos is just too much for me because it reminds me of my opinion of the musical Chorus Line, which I feel is way too self indulgent. Maybe the patterns are getting too obvious even if the books continue to be well written. We have another denouement in a violent storm.  We have the usual surprise turn of events to unmask the killer. We have lots more good eats and drink in the Bistro lovingly described. We take walks and sit on the park bench with Ruth. Are there just too many nasty twisted characters?

Reading her books in order is almost a necessity but I do look forward to the next book's change of scenery, which is a Monastery and not Three Pines. 

Book Review Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

Bury Your Dead  Louise Penny’s fifth novel in the Inspector Gamache series  ought to be a duo with her fourth entry,  A Brutal Telling,  since it ties up several  hanging  chads left over from the last book. 

  

In this offering Inspector Gamache is still on leave after the disastrous shootout that left several Surete agents dead and left both him and his chief assistant, Jean Paul Beauvoir  hospitalized. Though both are now reasonably recovered physically, the mental wounds remain.   Gamache searches for solace in Quebec City with his old boss Emile, but quickly finds himself caught up in the murder of a publicity seeking archaeologist in the basement of a staid old library. 

While Gamache begins an informal search for the killer in wintry Quebec City, he assigns  Jean Paul to take a vacation in the good old village of Three Pines where the murder of the hermit from the last book has now left Gamache thinking that he may have arrested, tried, and convicted the wrong man as the killer. 

Penny now masterfully seques between the two searches. We see Olivier, the Bistro owner from the last book, exonerated and we see the killer in Quebec City caught and dealtt with.  At the end the world returns to what passes for normal in the mind of the ever anguished  Gamache. 

Along the way we also learn a great deal more about the deadly shootout that continues to haunt the Inspector and there is a nice bonus accruing in the amount of Quebec history that Penny has marshaled for us.  Stylistically she is once again a master descriptor of weather and nature.  Over and over the snow and cold outside is contrasted with the warmth of roaring fires on the inside.  Blizzards seem to descend just as the suspense rises and the solutions near. Good eats, tastily described and joyfully consumed,  also seem to add a pleasant gastronomic accompaniment to the narrative. 

I found Bury Your Dead, quite satisfying, but would note again that it does pay to read Penny's novels in order—particularly this one.

Book review Spy Mistress

Spy Mistress by William Stevenson  2007

I have had some interest in WWII intelligence operations ever since I confirmed that my Uncle John was a spy during that war. The confirmation came partially from a box of materials sent to me after his death and then from now unclassified government files of his employment records with the OSS. He probably only took an occasional cloak and dagger trip because his work was primarily analytic in his academic background area of far eastern anthropology and sociology.  Uncle John’s story has plenty of gaps and is still waiting to be told in detail. There is definitely a book in there somewhere.

This brings me to the book I have just finished titled Spy Mistress by William Stevenson. It is an outline of the actions and career of Vera Atkins, a Romanian Jew who became one of the leaders in England’s  WWII secret service. She grew up in Eastern Europe and changed her name when she settled in Britain in the 1930’s. And just like my Uncle John, there are gaps in her story right up to the present day.  

Atkins successfully hid her Jewish background and rose to power in the intelligence community in spite of being a woman in an almost completely male organization.  The book tells the story of how Atkins maneuvered her way into essentially running the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe during and after the war. It also covers her relationships with several men including General “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of America’s newly formed OSS.  One of the many things I learned was just how strong the Appeasement movement and the  virulent anti-Semitism were in the pre-war era. Churchill was not in power yet and had major difficulty trying to convince both his own countrymen and allies of the danger of Hitler.  When Bismarck said that Hitler was just a mob leader, Churchill replied with some fascinating lines from Kipling that also seem compelling in today’s political climate.

“This is the sorrowful story

Told when the twilight fails

And the monkeys walk together

Holding their neighbor’s tails.”

At another point Churchill returned to Kipling to comment that “These appeasers feed the crocodile in the hope of being the last to get eaten.”  The early chapters are devoted to the lead up to the war and then it turns to the fight to formulate the  SOE (Special Operations Executive), which was charged with training, equipping, and organizing armed resistance in Nazi occupied countries.  Atkins began her career as a kind of an administrative assistant and slowly gravitated into leadership as her knowledge and skills became evident.  The old line military intelligence held little truck with sabotage and guerilla warfare, but Atkins and her associates supported the use of so called "closework" that followed the philosophy of the Greek physician Hippocrates  who said “A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy”  

The SOE was heavily involved in the insertion of agents and the organization of resistance cells as well as developing unusual tools for transmitting messages and for bomb making and other devices for killing or maiming the enemy.  One project involved the insertion of explosives into piles of animal feces. If this sounds James Bondish, it might be well to note that Ian Flemming was an important figure in the SOE hierarchy.   

I must admit that I was not aware of how much pushback there was against guerilla war in occupied areas and how much anti-Semitism sentiment there was in the upper levels of the British government. Throughout the war, even after Churchill came to power and the USA entered the fray, the British authorities did not want to send Jews onto the continent even though they had the most experience in being vilified and murdered and had a real reason to engage in physical payback.

Atkins survived the war and lived on in relative obscurity for many years. Some of her story was not told until after her death.  I wish the book had a somewhat more vivid style and a more compelling narrative structure. Events are often tied to individuals in Europe whose names and background are unfamiliar at least to me. This can bog things down and tempt the reader to skip things rather than participating in a cohesive progression. My guess is that works like this end up being read by fiction writers who then build their own more engaging and suspenseful stories of heroic actions.

I give it a 3.  But I did learn some things.