In This Grave Hour: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

I have been in need of some serious escapism these past few weeks and when I was much younger, Agatha Christie was my go-to for escapism reading. I decided to stick with the same genre this time, and dove into Jacqueline Winspear's In this Grave Hour, the second Maisie Dobbs novel I've read (and liked - really liked!). Although the circumstances are heavy - Maisie hires onto her latest murder case on the very day England declares war on Germany - there's nothing too heavy or heady about this book.

So. The Belgian Embassy hires private investigator Maisie following the death of a Belgian refugee from "the last war," who has lived quietly and worked hard right up until he was robbed and murdered in broad daylight, but with no witnesses. Having no leads and diminishing resources (the toll of the nascent war, already), Scotland Yard has given the case short shrift, but the Embassy wants answers...before there is another murder. (Which, c'mon, this being a murder mystery, you know there's going to be.)

I'm realizing belatedly that, unlike Agatha Christie novels which had virtually no continuation of plot themes from one mystery to the next, Winspear has seemingly constructed a series, and what struck me initially as similarities between elements of the plot in both books is actually a continuation of the story. As I will undoubtedly work my way through more of Maisie, I'll have to remember that for the future!

Four stars.

Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service - The Untold Story of World War II Resistance in Europe

Gordon Corera, a BBC correspondent, happened upon a trove of World War II-era files that detailed a relatively unknown pigeon service that relied on the homing ability of the birds to carry messages from occupied Europe back to Britain. Operation Columba is the result of his find, and subsequent research.

Essentially, the British security (espionage) services, devised a plan to drop pigeons into Europe and then request those who found the birds to complete surveys about the German occupation, clarity of BBC reception, and a host of other factors and then release the pigeons for the return to Britain.If only it were that easy. The bird might not survive the initial drop, or might be turned into the Germans, or might be devoured by the starving populace, or might become a hawk's dinner on the return flight to Britain. And even if it made it, the intelligence might be worthless, or might have fallen out along the way, or, or, or. Yet, one of these messages returned such a trove of intelligence as to be shown to Churchill himself.

I found the most troublesome aspect of the history to be the hope that it inspired in the Belgians, particular those whose christened themselves the Leopold Vindictive, which simply could not be realized. As Corera explains, it wasn't as simple as being able to deliver a pigeon on command (see the reasons above!), but the Belgians could not know that and some risked - and lost - everything in a desperate bid to contact London. Whether the British had considered such possibilities is unknown and unknowable, but I couldn't help but feel that to a certain extent the British were "using" those in occupied Europe, even if their intentions were noble.

Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service is not at all a bad book. It simply suffers from being of the exact same genre as The Winter Fortress and, in comparison, pales a bit. The action wasn't quite as fast, and the intrigue wasn't quite as high.

 Three stars.

The Midwife of Hope River: A Novel of an American Midwife

In The Midwife of Hope River, Patricia Harman gives readers the story of fictional, Depression-er midwife Patience Murphy, who has arrived in the hills and hollers of West Virginia shortly before the market crashes and the mines begin to close. Quietly and steadily, Patience delivers babies across the hardscrabble region, where the ravages of man and mother nature are never far. (Jenny Lee has nothing on Patience Murphy...or the actual women who performed the acts Harman has ascribed to her fictional protagonist!)

Patience is the star of the book, along with her apprentice Bitsy and the local veterinarian, Daniel Hester, but Harman does a masterful job of incorporating the history of the miners' struggles, such that part of Midwife read like pages from The Devil Is Here in These Hills. The books reads easily, and quickly, with each chapter essentially the story of one more birth, though the entire story is woven together into a delightful whole.

Aspects of it reminded me of The Truth According to Us, with its tales of Depression-era life in tiny towns tucked into the mountains. Between the two, I found The Midwife of Hope River to be the richer read, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Once a Midwife.

Five stars. 

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb

Neal Bascomb's The Winter Fortress is an in-depth look at the British-Norwegian operations to cripple the Norwegian heavy water plant in the midst of World War II.

First, a little science. Heavy water is one of the necessary ingredients for the production of an atomic bomb. In the early days of World War II, before the Manhattan Project and Little Boy and Fat Man and Hiroshima, scientists were fairly certain of this, but hadn't yet put the pieces together, on either side of the Atlantic. As the war progressed and the Allies became more confident of the nuclear recipe, the necessity of destroying Norway's Vemork plant, the only plant that produced the heavy water the Nazis needed.

Bascomb provides a bit of the science background early and then delves into the top secret operations devised by the British and Norwegians to sabotage the plant. These operations are fascinating the way Operation Mincemeat was fascinating: it's incredible to think that someone came up with such multi-faceted, ingenious, hard plans. And that they worked!

Admittedly, I previously knew next to nothing about Norway's role in World War II, and so this book also served as a bit of a primer for me in that sense. Ultimately, though, one can't help but be struck by the indomitable spirit of those who were determined to resist and the ability of the human body to adapt and survive. (The will to survive: feasting on reindeer parts for months on end while skiing a dozen miles a day charging and recharging massive batteries in the hope of making contact with London with a makeshift radio. In the midst of blizzards dumping four feet of snow and producing ferocious winds capable of sailing you off the roof.)

Five stars.

The Weight of Ink

At nearly 600 pages, Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink is a veritable tome of (mostly) historical fiction. The dual (and occasionally treble) narrative is driven by the 21st century discovery of 17th century documents. Their importance lies in the hand that wrote them; the scribe was a woman, one of the handful of Jews in London at the time, working for one of the most notable rabbis of the age. Simultaneously, then, the reader is thrust into two stories: that of British historian Helen Watt, she of failing health, but steel will, and her American postgrad assistant, Aaron Levy, who find themselves competing to translate and interpret the treasure trove with another team of historians; and the story of Ester Velasquez, the enigmatic scribe.

Of the two narratives (the first of which branches into it's own set of past and present stories), the second - Ester's - is by far the strongest. Kadish writes to richly of 17th century London, and particularly the Jewish culture within that specific time, that one can't help but be awed by the undertaking that The Weight of Ink  represents. The story is richly detailed, underpinned by an explanation of competing schools of philosophical thought and, of course, the role of religion - any religion. In this, the echoes of Gutenberg's Apprentice are unmistakable: whatever one's position in society and whatever one's beliefs, the organized religions of the day control all. Men can and did lose their heads to prevent them thinking thoughts contrary to those accepted as the unassailable truth.

Too, Kadish offers her readers the unmistakable truth that however constrained a man's life might be the circumstances of the 17th century, he still retained some modicum of control over his choices. Ester might be the rabbi's most brilliant student, but as a woman, the path of her life is dictated from her birth. It is this idea that Ester finds most abhorrent and that she fights hardest - and with which Helen Watt feels the greatest kinship, as though Ester is reaching out to her across the centuries. I couldn't help but contrast these very real constraints to their more modern iterations. Ester's lot makes even the harshest circumstances in All the Single Ladies seem mild by comparison.

With less focus on Helen and Aaron, this would easily be a five star read. It's a fine work of historical fiction, with a compelling plot and engaging characters. I recognize that Kadish used the discovery of Ester's paper as a jumping off point for telling her story, but to my mind there's nothing wrong with historical fiction set entirely within itself. It's the difference between People of the Book and The Midwife of Venice.

Four-and-a-half stars.