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Summary
Summary
A propulsive novel of World War II espionage by the author of New York Times best seller The Glass Room .
Barely out of school and doing her bit for the British war effort, Marian Sutro has one quality that makes her stand out--she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of nineteen, she finds herself undergoing commando training, attending a "school for spies," and ultimately, one autumn night, parachuting into France from an RAF bomber to join the WORDSMITH resistance network.
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;But there's more to Marian's mission than meets the eye of her SOE controllers; her mission has been hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris and persuade a friend--a research physicist--to join the Allied war effort. The outcome could affect the whole course of the war.
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, Trapeze is both an old-fashioned adventure story and a modern exploration of a young woman's growth into adulthood. There is violence, and there is love. There is death and betrayal, deception and revelation. But above all there is Marian Sutro, an ordinary young woman who, like her real-life counterparts in the SOE, did the most extraordinary things at a time when the ordinary was not enough.
Author Notes
Author and biology teacher Simon Mawer was born in England in 1948. He studied at Somerset's Millfield School and Oxford's Brasenose College, receiving a degree in zoology. Mawer's first novel, Chimera, won the McKitterick Prize, while The Fall earned the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. He has written several other novels, as well as the exhibition companion volume Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics. His novel, Tightrope, made the New Zealand Best Seller List in 2015 and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mawer follows his Man Booker-shortlisted The Glass Room with another WWII novel based on the fascinating true story of Englishwomen whose French-language fluency led them to be deployed, via parachute, into France as agents of the resistance. The young Marian Sutro is one such woman, recruited to join the mission that gives Mawer his title, which sends her behind enemy lines in occupied France and connects her with loves both old and new. Though Marian's naivete and willful carelessness make her an improbable operative, her (somewhat convenient) ties to scientists researching the atomic bomb put her in a powerful and dangerous position. Slow to start (Marian's drop into France comes well into the story), the novel picks up when she navigates the dangerous world of occupied Paris, constantly questioning who she can trust and who will betray her. While the history behind this story is captivating, Mawer's take unfolds with inertia, is leaden with research that often feels unnecessary to the story, and is plagued with undeveloped characters, particularly his young heroine. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Recruited initially for her fluency in speaking French, 19-year-old Marian Sutro survives rigorous training to become a valued operative in the British Special Operations Executives during World War II. Dropped into German-occupied Paris by parachute in an operation called Trapeze, she has a primary task of bringing research physicist Clement Pelletier, a man she loved at the age of 16, to England to help create the atomic bomb. The danger in Marian's work is palpable, despite the youth and beauty that is intended to make her a less likely terrorist in German eyes, as she goes about her tasks under various code names while struggling with her feelings for fellow operative Benoit, with whom she loses her virginity, and now-married Clement. Much-lauded British author Mawer vividly describes the deprivations in a war-occupied country and its once-vibrant capital and provides testimony to the courage of countless members of the French Resistance. But this is primarily a masterfully crafted homage to the 53 extraordinary women of the French section of the SOE on whose actual exploits the novel is based. With its lyrical yet spare prose and heart-pounding climax, this is a compelling historical thriller of the highest order.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
When Marian Sutro, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in Britain, volunteers to train as an agent for the government's ultrasecretive Special Operations Executive in World War II, she is instructed, "We like our people to learn to talk pleasantly and say nothing." The protocol requires a significant personality adjustment for Mawer's vinegary and voluble protagonist, who risks ail to spirit a prominent physicist (who also happens to be a would-be paramour from her teenage days) out of Nazi-occupied France. Marian dodges a multiplicity of unsavory individuals and enemy traps, equipped with one cyanide pill, two aliases and a memorized laundry list of agentry verbo tens. ("Don't show relief," "Never make up a cover story on the fly." "Never appear to be at a loss.") She also works in a few bedroom trysts and, in one of the mission's more outré interludes, smuggles wireless crystals in her vagina. Spiky banter and character shadings enhance what is, in the end, a collection of road-tested war-thriller gestures. They whoosh by at such velocity that you might not mind, even as you're left dangling at the denouement in cliffhanger purgatory, waiting for the sequel.
Library Journal Review
Nineteen-year-old Marian Sutro is doing her part to support the British war effort as a member of the Women's Auxillary Air Force (WAAF). She is strong, tenacious, and flawlessly fluent in French. These attributes lead the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to recruit her for sabotage and espionage work in German-occupied France. Marian's mission is further complicated when she is ordered to find and convince an old flame, now a physicist working on a new bomb, to join the Allies. VERDICT Blending fact with fiction, Mawer's (The Glass Room) latest novel is a historical spy thriller with a realistic feminine voice that should appeal to a wide readership. The writing is fast-paced and engrossing. Occasional dry spots are juiced up with plenty of Paris dazzle, heart, and action. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/12; for a nonfiction account of the SOE's activities, see Sarah Helm's A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII.-Ed.]-Therese Oneill, Monmouth, OR (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The plane tilts, turning in a wide circle, engines roaring. Up in the cockpit she can imagine the pilot searching, searching, straining to see the tiny glimmers of torchlight, which means that they are expected down there in the moonlight. A light comes on in the roof of the fuselage, a single, unblinking red eye. The dispatcher gives the thumbs up. "HE'S FOUND IT!" There's a note of admiration and triumph in his shout, as though this proves what wonders his crew are able to perform, to come all this way in the darkness, eight hundred miles from home, and find a pinprick of light in a blackened world. He attaches the static line from their parachutes to the rail on the roof of the fuselage and double checks the buckles of their harnesses. The aircraft makes one pass over the dropping zone and she can hear the sound of the containers leaving the bomb bay and see them flash beneath, their canopies billowing open. Then the machine banks and turns and steadies for the second run. "YOUR TURN NOW!" the dispatcher yells at the pair of them. "Merde, alors!" Benoit mouths to Marian, and grins. He looks infuriatingly unconcerned, as though this is all in the normal run of things, as though as a matter of course people throw themselves out of aircraft over unknown countryside in the middle of the night. Merde alors! She sits with her feet out through the hole, in the slipstream, like sitting on a rock with your feet in the water, the current pulling at them. Benoit is right behind her. She can feel him against the bulk of her parachute pack, as though the pack has become a sensitive extension of her own body. She says a prayer, a baby prayer pulled out of childhood memory, but nevertheless a prayer and therefore a sign of weakness: God, please look after me. Which means, perhaps, Father look after me, or Maman look after me, but whatever it means she doesn't want any sign of weakness now, not at this moment of deliverance with the slipstream rushing past her and the void beneath, while the dispatcher gives her a nod that's meant to inspire confidence but only brings with it the horror of superstition, that you must never congratulate yourself, never applaud, never even wish anyone good luck. Merde alors! That was all you ever said. Merde alors! She thinks, a prayer of a kind, as the red light blinks off and the green light comes on and the dispatcher shouts "GO!" and there's his hand on her back and she lets go, plunging from the rough comfort of the fuselage into the raging darkness over France. Excerpted from Trapeze by Simon Mawer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
