On the Tightrope

Simon Mawer was Booker short-listed six years ago for The Glass Room, an admirable novel inspired by the building of a famous Mies van der Rohe villa in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and by the people who, in the author’s imagination, lived there before the Gestapo moved into it.

Since then Mawer has written two more novels, The Girl who Fell from the Sky and, published last month, Tightrope, in which the menace of Nazi occupation, and its aftermath, again looms over all that happens.

The heroine of the first of these is parachuted into France to live dangerously while helping the Resistance. Her story continues in the second, growing out of  its predecessor’s quietly chilling ending.  Both books have been compared favourably with John Le Carre. The writing is of a similar high quality but Mawer travels his own route into the world of espionage, with gripping results.

Mawer, who teaches in Rome, is a good writer -  he deserved his Booker nomination - who does not overdo the menace but lets his heroine, Marian, deal with it as it comes. Do her wartime experiences change her personality as the story of Tightrope moves into the Cold War? Has Ravensbruck driven her mad or was she - inevitably you come to think  - a bit mad anyway?

On the basis that you do not have to be paranoid to believe that you are being followed, the book advances strongly. I liked it very much and look forward to Mawer’s next.
9 August 2015