Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Tightrope by Simon Mawer

A Cold War drama anchored by a shape-shifting, charismatic heroine, Tightrope is Simon Mawer’s follow-up to The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, in which he first introduced Marian Sutro as a fictional counterpart to the likes of Nancy Wake and Violette Szabo, who were likewise recruited to the Special Operations Executive and trained to act as agents in Nazi-occupied Europe.

This story of Marian traces the arc of her life from the perspective of narrator Sam Wareham, whose passion for his mother’s friend begins in naïve adolescence and eventually ignites into a short-lived affair, which even Sam recognizes as the most he can expect from a woman with a wandering eye and an inability to retain such a fundamental possession as her name. “The whole damn story”, Sam ruminates, “is riddled with clichés, heroine being one of them. Traitor being another.”

Mawer is aware, then, of the minefield presented by a foray into Cold War fiction, a genre synonymous with the grey-man machinations of le Carré. It’s an historical period that when viewed from the distant reaches of the 21^st century’s second decade is apt to look faintly ludicrous: how could ‘mutually assured destruction’ ever have seemed possible?

The author tamps down the risk of mimicry or comedy by first grounding Marian in the sickening reality of the short-lived Nazi empire. Captured on a train station platform in France while couriering for the SOE, she is interrogated and then incarcerated in Ravensbruck, an experience of which she never speaks but the memory of which is betrayed in “the stink of the camps” that seems to emanate from her body for years afterwards. She survives in part by assuming the identity of a dead fellow prisoner, and by her translation skills as a German speaker.

So it is that after the war, not yet 23, Marian finds herself with no skills except languages and an ability to kill men. We know she survives into her dotage – the novel is bookended by scenes in which Sam is reunited with an elderly Marian in her home, where he assumes possession of her diary – but the most fascinating elements of Mawer’s tale take place as Marian attempts to find her footing, and role, in post-war London.

It’s an aspect of the restoration of peace so rarely addressed in fiction but cogently examined by Mawer: the shock of the banal, the perplexity of being thrust back into episodic civilian life with no imminent threat of destruction. Marian herself is “drifting through a neutral space” where emotion is remembered but not felt. Memory is no ally, the horror of Ravensbruck and the loss of pre-war paramours being all too immediate.

That she is no candidate for either the secretarial pool or domestic duties doesn’t stop Marian assuming the role of wife, which serves more as cover for her re-entry into clandestine information-gathering than emotional partnership. Sam likely speaks for her several suitors when he describes Marian as “the paragon of all female virtues: courageous, independent, slightly bloody-minded . . . disturbingly attractive.” She is capable of love, as evidenced by her relationship of equals with her brother Ned, but Sam’s adoration – strikingly similar, in moments, to the feelings of Stingo for William Styron’s Holocaust survivor Sophie – is indubitably a one-way street.

Marian has many life-prolonging qualities, above them all an instinct for survival, and in the intricate, enticing Tightrope – an apposite title if ever there was one – Mawer has created a heroine, and an escape artist, for the ages.