SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Note: Author Marco Malvaldi is a WINNER of the Castiglioncello Prize for Fiction for his crime novels.

“A boring job can bring out the best in a person…Go onto automatic pilot, and let your brain keep ticking over.  When he developed the theory of relativity, Einstein was working in a patent office.  Boll was a census gatherer, and Bulgakov a country doctor…Borges was a librarian… Give an imaginative man a dull, repetitive job that puts him in contact with others…and there’s a strong possibility you’ll produce a Nobel Prize winner.”—Massimo Viviani, owner-bartender of the Bar Lume.

The second novel in the Bar Lume series, by Marco Malvaldi, Three-Card Monte brings us once more into the life of Pineta, a small town in Tuscany, near Pisa, with the Bar Lume and its often hilarious characters as its focal point.  Owned by thirty-seven-year-old Massimo Viviani, a single man trying to put his life back together after a devastating romantic breakup, the Bar Lume has become a refuge for him – or as much of a refuge as any place can be when it is occupied every day by four cranky and gossipy oldtimers who regard “their table” at the Bar Lume as their “office.”  Ranging in age from seventy-three to eighty-two, they have known each other all their lives –and they keep up a running commentary on everything that is happening in town and everyone who is involved in it.  Drop one word in front of this elderly quartet from the Bar Lume, and it will make its way instantly all over town without any of the men ever having to leave the “office.”

Massimo’s grandfather Ampelio, the oldest of the four patrons, has been “the uncontested winner of [a] cursing competition at a local festival,” and he is the best story-teller among the group.  Once he decides to tell a story, “the only thing that could stop him…would be military intervention by NATO.”  He is joined at the table by Aldo, the owner of an upscale restaurant and catering service.  Pilade del Tacca, formerly employed at the town hall, knows everyone, despite the fact that he is difficult and as “unpleasant as a piece of [something] under your shoe.” Gino, a retired postal worker, looks “halfway between a nursing home patient and an escaped convict,” with “vaguely nostalgic ideas about the Fascist period.”  Together they are a formidable cast of characters – independent, earthy, garrulous, and hilariously funny – who keep the patient bartender Massimo entertained, sometimes frustrated, and constantly busy as they tease each other while also revealing their values and their attitudes toward life.

The Ponte Solferino in Pisa, which Massimo crosses on his way to the university to ask for technical help in solving the mystery here.

In the previous novel in the series, Game for Five, in which a local murder takes place and is investigated on the local level, Massimo the bartender is seen as a sympathetic character who astutely “directs traffic” within that novel, helping the sometimes incompetent police as the novel leads up to the climax, in which Massimo solves the murder.  We know only as much about him as we need to know to make us empathize with him.

Three-Card Monte, however, is quite different from this in its focus, significantly expanding Massimo’s character and showing him to be a far more complex character capable of solving a far more complicated murder than in the previous novel.  The opening quotation from this review alone is ample proof that Massimo is starting to find his intellectual “mojo” again as he gets back on his feet emotionally.

Scientists at the University of Pisa use their technical expertise to help investigate the death of Asahara.

As the novel opens, Koichi Kawaguchi, a computer expert, has just arrived at the airport on his way to the Twelfth International Workshop in Macromolecular and Biomacromolecular Chemistry in Pineta, one of about two hundred theoretical and experimental scientists who are attending.  Author Malvaldi obviously has fun with this introduction, commenting on the reactions of Kawaguchi to Italy’s “airport chaos,” which he finds far more orderly than the chaos at Narita – and to such amenities as the men’s rooms, far different from those in Japan.  Cultural differences among the various delegates are also noted as the novel develops. When, for example, the sloppily dressed Prof. A. C. J. Snijders, from the Netherlands, decides not to attend a conference session in which he has no interest, he simply does not go, spending the afternoon swimming and reading a book at the hotel pool instead.  Kawaguchi has no interest in the lectures – they are not even in his specialty – yet he has to be there, looking sharp, for business reasons, and he suffers terribly as he watches Snijders having fun at the pool.  Kawaguchi’s life takes a new turn when the main speaker, elderly Kiminobu Asahara, is found dead in his hotel room.

Massimo is furious when he discovers a scooter blocking  “his” parking spot at an arch near his apartment.

Inspector Vinicio Fusco, of the local police, is in charge of the investigation, and as he does not speak either Japanese or English, he calls on Massimo, who speaks English, to translate his Italian into English and convey his questions to the English-speaking Kawaguchi, who has been chosen to be a translator, as they interview Japanese participants who knew Asahara.  Koichi asks Fusco’s questions to the Japanese participants, conveys their (edited) answers in English to Massimo (whom he thinks has “a face like a Taliban,”), who then edits again and translates most of what he hears to Fusco in Italian.  As the investigation develops, it becomes, in some ways like “three-card monte,” a game of trickery which Aldo learned when he worked on board a ship.

At a bookstore near his apartment, Massimo buys a book, then gets an idea when he sees this one on the counter. He buys it as “an homage to the author,” then returns to the arch and disables the scooter blocking his parking spot.

The solution to the mystery, which comes at the very end, becomes almost incidental to all the fun of the novel and the amusing commentary the author makes on life in Italy, including the politics of academia, the behavior of the press, and the inability of anyone in the whole country to keep a secret.  The novel is great fun to read, despite the fact that the conclusion, as it turns out, depends on more technical knowledge than I possess.  It is here in the conclusion that the author’s own background as a scientist (with a Master’s degree in Chemistry) is revealed, and though he reduces the complications to the bare minimum, my own science background, limited as it is, occurred too far in the past to be relevant here.  Short, hilarious, and clever, with increasingly complex characters, Three-Card Monte is a delightful light entertainment, perfect for summer reading.

ALSO by Malvaldi:  GAME FOR FIVE

NOTE: The trickery of the card game of Three-Card Monte, is shown and explained in this video:

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is found here:  http://lettura.corriere.it/

The Ponte Solferino in Pisa appears on http://www.progettosnaps.net/

A few of the buildings at the University of Pisa are shown on http://en.wikipedia.org/

THREE METERS ABOVE THE SKY by Federico Moccia is sitting on the counter when Massimo goes to buy a book, giving him an idea on how to solve the scooter problem.  He buys the book as “an homage to the author.”

ARC: Europa Editions

Note: Author Favel Parrett was WINNER of the Newcomer of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards for 2012; WINNER of the Dobbie Award for 2012; and SHORTLISTED for the Miles Franklin Award for 2012.

“Out past the shallows, past the sandy-bottomed bays, comes the dark water – black and cold and roaring.  Rolling out the invisible paths.  The ancient paths to Bruny, or down south along the silent cliffs, the paths out deep to the bird islands that stand tall between nothing but water and sky.  Wherever rock comes out of the deep water, wherever reef rises up, there is abalone.  Black-lipped soft bodies protected by shell.  Treasure.”

Dark, stark, and potent in its story and its message, Past the Shallows reduces life to its most basic elements as perceived by two young brothers, Miles and Harry Curren, who share the story of their uncertain lives on an island at the tail end of the inhabited world.  Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia, where their father fishes for abalone in the dark water, offers no refuge, either physically or emotionally, from fate and the elements – just open water from there all the way to Antarctica.  As difficult as the setting may be, the boys’ dysfunctional family is worse.  The boys’ father, a threatening and often intemperate “hard man,” offers the young boys no emotional support in their difficult lives made worse by his drinking and irrational behavior.  Their older brother Joe is living alone at his grandfather’s house, clearing it out after his death.  Their mother died so long ago that they remember almost nothing of her or the car crash which killed her, just occasional flashes of memory of the ride they shared with her up to the fatal moment.  The only woman with whom they have any contact is their Aunty Jean, whose own attitudes toward them alternate between callous indifference and the kind of attention that usually arises more from obligation than from love.  There is no softness, no warmth of love, from anyone in their lives.

As the novel opens, the three brothers are on the beach at nearby Cloudy Bay on Bruny Island, a good place to surf, and their personal and emotional differences become clear from the outset.  Nineteen-year-old Joe is marking time, getting ready to leave “home,” or what passes for it, and though he is accommodating to Harry when Harry is hungry, and also gives him some games to play on the beach so he won’t be bored while Joe and Miles are surfing, he is already planning a new life in a new part of the world.  Miles, who appears to be about nine or ten, “could stay out in the water, forever, even if it was freezing,” and he “knew there were things that no one could teach you – things about the water.  You just knew them or you didn’t and no one could tell you how to read it.  How to feel it.”   Harry, the youngest, perhaps six or seven, is different from his brothers.  He hates the ocean, and fears it.  Hyper-sensitive and observant of the nature around him, Harry is also vulnerable and a bit psychic, and when he picks up an abalone shell while waiting for his brothers to finish surfing, “every cell in his body stopped…[He] felt the people who had been here before, breathing and standing alive where he stood,” and even at his young age he “understood right down in his guts, that time ran on forever and that one day he would die.”

Double click to enlarge map. The action takes place at the far southern locations. Note Bruny Island, important here.

The narrative line hides itself within episodes told by both Miles and Harry, moving back and forth as they live their everyday lives and as they think about the past.  A major event in their lives had occurred a few years ago, when their Uncle Nick was dragged by a rip current out to sea in the dark, and the usual search for him was postponed by another emergency which occurred that same night – the boys’ mother’s death in the car crash which the boys survived.   Both Miles and Harry think about that night often, trying to make sense of their fading memories.  The boys are close, though they lead very different lives.

Diving for abalone

During the summer, Miles must help his father on the boat in all kinds of weather, doing the job of an adult, while Harry, too young and too prone to seasickness to go on the boat at all, if he can help it, is able to take a little road trip with Aunty Jean to Hobart and the Regatta, a huge break in the routine he faces every day.  Gradually, the story of Aunty Jean’s bad relationship with the boys’ father emerges, and the reader can only wonder why she made the choices she made which have so alienated the family. Though emergencies often occur at sea, Dad and his partner on the boat often act without thinking, thereby increasing the chances that emergencies will become disasters.  When these do occur, the author provides just enough detail to make the reader feel for the characters as they fight against the harshness of nature and the accidents of fate, without any hearts and flowers or any sentimental embroidery of the facts.

The Southern Lights, which Harry sees across the plains, just before the the novel’s turning point.

The author keeps her writing clean, developing strong contrasts between life at sea and the life on land which Harry pursues.  Life even becomes a bit sweet for him when he befriends a small dog and, eventually, its owner, an outcast, George Fuller, who lives alone, takes care of his house, does his own fishing at Cloudy Bay, and simply listens to Harry, the only person who does.  As the author continues to show life in all its permutations, Parrett introduces characters from the community, showing how others in the area live their lives, some much more successfully than the people the boys come into contact with in their daily lives.  Some people offer them advice about getting out of their home situation while there is still time, while others, like George, Harry’s friend, teach them how to fend for themselves more successfully.  The father’s treatment of the fearful Harry on one trip out to sea leads ultimately to the novel’s climax.

“Cloudy Bay looked brand new. Just born, the outlines becoming sharp as the sun rose, as the fog cleared. And like a dream, the waking cliffs glowed orange and the sand lit up silver and the sky, still pale violet was full and open.”

Throughout the novel, aspects of nature play a symbolic role, not in terms one associates with the pathetic fallacy, but as a parallel to the lives of the characters – the multi-faceted symbol of water; the abalone with its ugly exterior and its beautifully vibrant interior shell; sharks, shark teeth, and shark eggs; the act of surfing itself, and fire and light as elements, especially the “southern lights,” or Auroras, and the dawn.  The novel’s compression and the simplicity of its language make its beautiful images and its horrors that much more vibrant, its messages clear, while its natural dialogue makes the young characters both believable and memorable.  Lovers of literary fiction, book clubs, and teachers will find this powerful debut novel a never-ending source of lively discussion.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears is from https://www.hodder.co.uk/

The map of Tasmania may be found here.  Double-click to enlarge.  Note the location of Bruny Island in the far south.  It is an important location throughout the novel.  Cloudy Bay is located on Bruny Isl.  http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

Abalone diving is found here: http://best-diving.org/

Abalone shell interior

The SouthernLights are shown on http://www.hotspotmedia.co.uk/ They appear just before the turning point in the novel when Harry sees them at night from his bed.

Cloudy Bay, a major symbol, is located on Bruny Island appears on http://tasmania.bushwalk.com/ “The water was calm, resting and waiting and letting them pass.  Just the right amount of wind to sail without having tp work hard, without having to work at all.  They moved silently into the bay and through the thinning mist. Cloudy Bay looked brand new. Just born, the outlines becoming sharp as the sun rose, as the fog cleared. And like a dream, the waking cliffs glowed orange and the sand lit up silver and the sky, still pale violet was full and open.”

The abalone shell appears on http://www.fortbragg.com/

“Only in exceptional cases do people reside in condemned buildings.  So one could say it was noteworthy that a single condemned building in Gnesta [Sweden], now housed the following: one American potter, two very similar and dissimilar brothers, one angry young woman, one escaped South African refugee, and three Chinese girls with poor judgment.  All of these people found themselves [living] in nuclear-weapons-free Sweden.  Right next door to a three-megaton atomic bomb.”

So wild and imaginative that it challenges the very meaning of the word “farce,” which, for me is usually something light-weight, silly, and easily forgotten, Swedish author Jonas Jonasson expands this “farce” beyond the customary local or domestic focus and uses the whole world as his stage.   Drawing his characters from South Africa, Israel, China, and Sweden, with a couple of Americans also earning passing swipes, he focuses on cultural and racial issues; world affairs, including the modern political history of several countries; and the accidents of history which have the power to change the world. The craziness starts with the novel’s over-the-top opening line: “In some ways they were lucky, the latrine emptiers in South Africa’s largest shantytown.  After all, they had both a job and a roof over their heads.”  And for the next four hundred pages, the bold absurdity continues, spreading outward until it eventually absorbs the kings, presidents, and prime ministers of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Author photo by Sara Arnald

Main character Nombeko Mayeki, a thirteen-year-old orphan in the late 1960s, has been a latrine worker in Soweto, South Africa’s largest shantytown, for the past eight years, educating herself on the job by counting the barrels she carries, then gradually making the counting exercises harder until she can multiply ninety-five by ninety-two in her head. She is as verbal as she is mathematical – and so astute as to motivations of those around her that she progresses quickly, both on the job and in her personal development, eventually learning to read and write and proving to be far more clever than the people who teach her.  By the time she turns fifteen, she has been so successful that she has accumulated a large store of raw diamonds and escaped Soweto on foot hoping to reach Pretoria, fifty miles away. Before she gets there, however, she is hit by a drunk driver who claims she was “walking on a sidewalk meant for whites.”  A judge sentences her to work for the man who struck her, at half-salary for seven years because of the damage she caused to the car.  The drunk driver, it turns out, works at Pelindaba, a nuclear research facility north of Johannesburg.

Shell casings for the "bombs that could never be used."

Confined for security reasons behind two fences for nine years, not the required seven, she meets several Chinese girls who teach her Chinese while passing along atomic secrets to the Chinese government. Nombeko later meets representatives of Israel’s Mossad and is on hand when the facility discovers that they have ordered six bombs to be made, though seven have been delivered.  The fate of the seventh bomb in the early 1980s controls the plot for the rest of the novel.

Alternating with the story of Nombeko is the story of Ingmar Qvist, a man whose life’s mission is to shake the hand of Swedish King Gustav V, who, in 1928 celebrated his seventieth birthday by giving out stamps with his photograph to the public.  Ingmar, only fourteen at the time, is horrified that he forgot to thank the king and has dreamed ever since of meeting him so he can look him in the eye to express his gratitude.

King Gustav V - 1858 - 1950

Spending much of his money on schemes to meet the king, Ingmar discovers, upon finally meeting him, that the king continuously looks beyond him, an event which not only insults him but causes him to assault the king, and to be struck by the king with his cane.  Instantly, he becomes virulently anti-monarchy, dedicated to deposing the king and his heirs.  Ingmar’s twin sons, both named Holger, disagree about the future.  One continues to be strongly in favor of the monarchy, the other wants it abolished in favor of democracy.

Within this framework, the author creates a vibrant farce involving the loyalties and relationships among people, countries, and political points of view from the time of Sweden’s King Gustav in the 1940s up through the nuclear developments in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, the end of apartheid and the Presidency of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in the 1990s, and up to the present in Sweden.  With South Africa’s social and political changes in the early 1990s , the government begins to look, long-term, at what might happen if Mandela were to become President and his supporters were to acquire the six atomic bombs which the country has already developed and tested, and the novel becomes more complex.  The very real involvement of the Israelis and the Chinese are paramount, and when Nombeko eventually arrives in Sweden, accompanied by the seventh bomb, the free-for-all becomes a reality.  The two plot lines converge with Nombeko living in a condemned factory building in Gnesta with her bomb and with Ingmar’s sons, Holger One and Holger Two, as the role of the Swedish government in protecting the world against nuclear proliferation becomes critical.

One of the keys to great farce, it seems to me, is that it says, or implies, much about the truths of our lives within an exaggerated scenario so off-the-wall in its presentation that the reader can laugh, even while recognizing the truths hidden within the craziness.  With this novel and its international complications, the genuine recognitions are very dramatic, but, at the same time, the novel sometimes becomes unusually complex, necessitating an exceptionally large number of characters and a length which stretches the limits of the genre.

King Carl XVI Gustav (far left) and Prime MInister Frederik Reinfeldt (far right) and their wives at a wedding, a far different situation from being in the back of a filthy potato truck driven by a crazy man.

Jonasson straddles the line admirably, especially since he cleverly matches his plot to real events acted out by real people in Swedish history.  The novel ends with a meeting of Hu Jintao, President of the People’s Republic of China, and King Carl XVI Gustav, when Frederik Reinfeldt was Prime Minister.  The scenes in which the king and Reinfeldt are confined to the back of a filthy potato truck driven by a crazy man are priceless, representing both real history and the potential horrors which have somehow been avoided – to date.  Picaresque, in terms of the plot, which wanders around following the life of Nombeko from the age of thirteen to forty-seven, the novel wastes no time in making its points about personal and political responsibility, or as the author says, “If God does exist, he must have a good sense of humor.”

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Sara Arnold appears on http://olvassbele.com

The shell casings for the “bombs that could never be used” in South Africa, and the story behind them, are shown here:  http://newobserveronline.com

King Gustav V (1855 – 1950) and his life are discussed on Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/

A condemned warehouse, similar to the one in which Nombeko and the two Holgers and their friends are living, is seen here:  http://www.building-cincinnati.com/

King Carl XVI Gustav and Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt, and their wives, dressed for a wedding, are depicted on http://www.news.com.au/ The men look far different here from what they must have looked like when they emerged from the back of a dirty potato truck which also accompanied the seventh atomic bomb.

Like so many others who have book blogs/websites, I like to check the site’s statistics, occasionally, to see which reviews are the most popular.  Some readers probably come here for reviews because they are students with assigned reading, some because they are interested in reading about a particular part of the world, and some because the authors are popular  favorites.

Here are the most popular book reviews on this site from January 1, 2014 – June 31, 2014:

1.  Jo Nesbo, THE REDEEMER—a perennial favorite here and a continuing surprise to me because it is not my favorite book by Jo Nesbo, and I’ve reviewed all of them here.  (My favorite is THE REDBREAST.)

2.  D. H. Lawrence, SONS AND LOVERS–a classic novel (1913), and his most autobiographical.

3.  Alan Paton, THE HERO OF CURRIE ROAD–a book which has been in the top three of my Most Popular Reviews ever since that review was posted in 2009.  The popularity of this review comes despite the fact that the book has never been released in the US or UK at all!  Copies of the book, published by “RandomHouse South Africa,” are available only through outside vendors on Barnes and Noble and  Amazon, in the South African edition.  It is, however, a wonderful, autobiographical collection of stories well worth pursuing for those who have long admired Paton and his role in South Africa.

4.  Edith Wharton, SUMMER–another classic (1917), and Wharton’s “most explicitly sexual novel.”

5.  Edmund de Waal, THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES–my favorite non-fiction book in many years!  A real treat for art lovers and historians.  Do take a look at the video at the bottom of the review.  The author is a prize-winning potter, in addition to being a sensitive writer.

6.  D. H. Lawrence, WOMEN IN LOVE–another classic (1920), often considered Lawrence’s greatest novel.

7.  Kamila Shamsie, KARTOGRAPHY–a warm and complex study of friendship and political unrest which deserves much wider readership.  The book, written and originally reviewed in 2003 and set in Pakistan, came on strong in this year’s site rankings.

8.  Maurizio de Giovanni, I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE—the first of a series of four mysteries set in Naples in the 1930s, during the reign of Mussolini.  Creative, and sometimes humorous, these mysteries are filled with local color.

9.  Zachary Mason, THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY–a post-modern version of this classic epic–casual, playful, and earthy.   The book is often humorous, despite its obvious attention to the original story.  The map of Odysseus’s journey (by Annenberg Lerner) , included here, also receives numerous hits on its own.

10.  Jane Gardam, A LONG WAY FROM VERONA–Published in 1971, and re-released this year by Europa Editions, it is Jane Gardam’s first novel, which begins when she is thirteen and first discovers the joy of books and writing, continuing through her teens, as the war breaks out.  Lovers of Gardam’s later novels will be especially interested to see how she became the writer she is.

“Would there have been the same laxity in the security checks if a man with a science degree from Cambridge had been in the same role as you?…Not only did they not check up on you, but the reason they didn’t was because you’re female.” –Joan’s barrister son Nick.

British author Jennie Rooney, who studied history at Cambridge, was first inspired to write this story of spies within Britain’s top secret atomic research labs when she read a newspaper article in 1999 about Melita Norwood, age eighty-seven, who was revealed to have been the “most important and longest-serving Soviet spy of the Cold War era.”  After her unmasking, Ms. Norwood’s interview with the press and her appearance on television, in which she was “rather economical with the truth, and not hugely remorseful,” according to Rooney, energized Rooney to investigate further.  At the same time she began to imagine the circumstances under which a seemingly innocuous worker for several British labs doing atomic research could have willingly passed documents and research notes to Russia for use in their own frantic race to develop nuclear weapons – all this without coming to the attention of MI5, the British Security Service until fifty years later. Just as importantly, Rooney also wanted to understand why and how Norwood – or anyone else, for that matter – could betray her own country and be able to live with herself, quietly and comfortably, in the very country whose secrets she had so treacherously revealed.

Author photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The result is a thoughtful and provocative novel, not a biography, in which a woman named Joan Stanley leads a life somewhat similar to that of Melita Norwood in its external details, though the author asserts strongly in the Author’s Note that “The differences between the two women…are varied and multiple, and Joan Stanley is not intended to be a representation of Melita Norwood.”  Likewise, she says, the fictional character of Sonya Galich, who “controlled” Joan Stanley, is similar in some ways to Melitta Norwood’s friend, Ursula Beurton, also known as Ruth Werner or Ruth Kuczynski, whose code name was also Sonya, though the fictional Sonya Galich is not based on Beurton’s real life.  A Russian emigree who worked in England, Ursula Beurton was also the controller of German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who, much like the fictional character of Kierl in the novel, passed information from American, British and Canadian research labs to Russia and was eventually convicted of spying in 1950.  Giving further verisimilitude to the narrative, Rooney incorporates additional historical detail to bring the times and the atmosphere at the end of World War II to vibrant life and to provide motivation for the actions taken by some of her characters here.

Melita Norwood, 1999.

The novel begins dramatically, in the present, with the ominous death of Sir William Mitchell of the Foreign Office, a man Joan Stanley has known since his early career as a Special Operations Executive during the war, more than sixty years ago.  “She knows the cause of death without needing to be told…something irrefutable, to have made him believe it was not worth trying to defend himself and his reputation,” and she wonders if new evidence of her own past has finally surfaced. She is not really surprised when “they come for her later that [Sunday] morning,” and accuse her of twenty-seven breaches of the Official Secrets Act” – treason – announcing that she should say anything she has to say in her own defense between then and Friday, because her name will be released to the House of Commons that day, with all the attendant publicity.  She denies any involvement whatsoever, however, then begins musing, privately, about her life when she was eighteen.

Cavendish Lab, Cambridge, where Joan worked, and where, earlier in 1932, physicists first split the atom.

Joan Stanley, as a Cambridge university student majoring in physics, is befriended by flamboyant fellow student Sonia Galich almost immediately after her arrival at college, and their fast friendship is enhanced by their shared interest in anti-fascist activities, Sonia through her membership in the communist party and Joan through her innocence and her upbringing as the daughter of a rural preacher who believed that the “government was letting people down,” his own version of socialism.  Through Sonya, an emigree orphan from Russia who grew up in Leipzig with her cousin Leo, Joan soon becomes attracted to Leo, believing that she is truly in love with him.  Leo introduces her to his political friends, declaring that he is “a socialist, not an anarchist,” and stating, idealistically, that he is looking for proof that the Soviet system works, that “if a society is properly planned and organised there will never be any unemployment.  Every person will be able to contribute.”

Later Joan and her boss, Max Davis, go to the Chalk River Labs in Canada to continue their search for a nuclear breakthrough.

The novel moves back and forth between the present and the past of the early 1940s, and the reader gradually comes to know all the characters, including Joan’s adopted son Nick, a barrister QC who represents her, determined to prove her innocent of the espionage charges.  Joan’s relationship with Sonia, who is much more aggressive about her political commitment and wants Joan to share it, changes with the tides in this novel, as does her relationship with Leo who is constitutionally unable to commit to any relationship, and when Sonia announces that she, Jewish, is planning to go to Switzerland immediately, before the official outbreak of war  in England, she tells Joan that she is relying on her to tell her what is happening in England.

Ursula Beurton/Ruth Werner, code named Sonya, who inspired the fictional Sonya, Joan's "controller" for the Soviets, though the book is not modeled on Beurton/Werner's life.

Shortly afterward, Joan receives a letter from the Metals Research Facility in Cambridge asking her to appear for an interview with Dr. Max Davis, for whom she must sign a non-disclosure agreement, part of the Official Secrets Act.  Joan now realizes that she will be working at a site dedicated to research toward the development of an atomic bomb.  How and why that is a turning point in Joan’s relationship with her country become the focus of the rest of the novel.  With her relatively straightforward plotting and the revealing back-and-forth of the point of view, the author has plenty of opportunity to develop her characters and their relationships, providing the reader with insights into the extraordinary circumstances which might drive someone to betray his/her country.  Ultimately, the novel moves beyond the time and place of the setting to larger questions of one’s overriding obligations to a nation (and the world at large) during times of unprecedented upheaval, forcing the reader to consider his/her own role as a human being and then as a citizen of a particular country.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Eamonn McCabe appears on http://www.theguardian.com/

Melita Norwood, on whose life this novel is loosely based, is shown in a story on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, where, in 1932, the atom was “split,” is also where Joan worked in one of her earliest jobs as a physicist.  http://www.english-heritage.org.uk

The Chalk River Labs, a later job for Joan and her boss, Max Davis, in Canada, expands the focus of the spy story and the involvement of Joan and other western scientists.  http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/

Ursula Beurton/Ruth Werner/Ruth Kuczynski, codename Sonya, inspired the character of Sonya Galich, though only in general terms, according to the Author’s Note. http://www.e-politik.de/lesen/artikel/2009/stalins-meisterspionin/

ARC:  Europa Editions