09/07/2015
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. (Nov.)
The characters in Simon Mawer’s latest spy thriller, Tightrope, set in the gray, exhausted, murky days of post-World War II England, spend a lot of time in tense encounters that pivot on the issue of who knows what, and who’s telling the truth about it...[Mawer] brings a fine sense of story, an intriguing plot and a lovely way with a sentence...Tightrope is full of satisfying twists, and we can’t help cheering for its tough, resourceful heroine…” —New York Times
“Mawer has excelled with another tangled, character-led literary thriller...A perfectly poised balancing act.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Outstanding...Mawer’s novel offers a meditation on the problem of identity in a world where everything is cover for something else. A spy novel with the psychological richness and complexity of literary fiction.” —Booklist (starred review)
“In Marian [Simon Mawer] has created a complex, contradictory heroine, emotionally fragile, endlessly resourceful, and unrepentantly amorous...[Tightrope] tells a dramatic story about one woman testing the boundaries of loyalty as one kind of war gives way to a shadowy new one.” —Publishers Weekly
“Heroine/'traitor' Marian, introduced in Trapeze, is compelling and complicated...Excellent for historical thriller readers and those interested in the dawn of the nuclear era.” —Library Journal
“A fun, intelligent read.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Tightrope is a beautifully written, artfully considered post-WWII existential spy story.” —The Boston Herald/Hollywood & Mine Blog
“Mawer is a skillful writer and this is a sophisticated, deviously constructed story of a woman who finds her true self in the distorting mirrors of the intelligence game.” —The Sunday Times (UK)
“Mawer’s period detail is perfect, and his prose impeccable. Mawer’s greatest creation is undoubtedly Marian herself...Beautifully inferred and brilliantly imagined…It is difficult to create a character with genuine charisma, but Mawer seems to have managed it with Marian. She is indeed perhaps the closest thing to a female James Bond in English literature.” —The Guardian (UK)
“Mawer captures Marian’s disorientation with affecting conviction. His feeling for time and place remains impressively sharp, from rationing-era London to the ‘strange, febrile vitality’ of post-war Paris. Marian remains a compelling heroine, whose many contradictions are all believable.” —The Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Mawer sensitively evokes the crushing normality of post war Britain and the struggle of a woman who has lived in high definition to forge a new life in a grey world.” —The Times (UK)
“Sutro is a singular creation—a fascinating and compelling character and the account of how she becomes caught up in Cold War espionage is enthralling.” —The Sunday Mirror
“Marian is at the heart of the novel...She is a thoroughly and impressively imagined character.” —The Scotsman (UK)
“A compelling Cold War story...told by a series of flashbacks...start’s a slow burn, but Mawer soon grips you with his labyrinthine plot.” —The Tatler (UK)
“In Marian, Mawer has created an attractively awkward figure—damaged, resilient, self-contained and needing danger in order to become truly herself...It is Mawer’s focus on character as much as on action, and on recognizing the morally complex worlds in which those characters operate, that inescapably calls John le Carré to mind. Comparisons can be invidious though: Mawer is no acolyte and here shows again his own distinctive talent.” —Financial Times (UK)
“Tightrope is a nuanced spy novel akin to the best work of John le Carré, in that it bypasses the cloak-and-dagger conventions in pursuit of the noble flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies that lie at the heart of the most fascinating spies...Mawer delivers an absorbing tale about an extraordinary woman who finds her understanding of duty, patriotism and honour ripped to shreds by epoch-defining circumstances.” —The Irish Times
“Tightrope is an excellent thriller with superb writing and a captivating sense of history.” —A Writer of History
09/15/2015
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 Ravensbrück 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
2015-08-18
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 Ravensbrück 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 Carré—a damaged individual trapped in a complex and morally ambiguous international intrigue set on the stage of the early Cold War.
