Novels No. 87

 

Kate Quinn. The Rose Code. USA: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2021.

Bletchley Park, a place of some mythology since the Second World War: where Brit personnel laboured in top secret to decipher intercepted German intelligence, transmitted via their daunting Enigma machines. Quinn gives us amazing detail how the many different “BP” units operated, using her three young women recruits as examples. Osla is a fun-loving upper class deb fluent in German and French; Mabel (call me Mab) is working class with practical secretarial skills. The two become best friends, and lure their landlady’s timid daughter into the service as well. Beth is uneducated and agoraphobic thanks to an abusive mother, reluctant to take part until her excellent grasp of cryptography boosts her confidence. The official secrets act says BP denizens can’t speak to anyone of their work but they can and do socialize; some romantic liaisons are inevitable. Mab seeks husband material while Osla holds a torch for a royal boyfriend.

That doesn’t mean their lives go smoothly or predictably. After months of feverish work and mental exhaustion, Beth triumphs in codebreaking one of Germany’s Enigma machines, prompting her to defy her mother and leave home; the three women happily share lodgings. But London is being pounded by the Blitz; BP people are prone to nervous breakdowns. Tragedy is never far in wartime: bombs and destruction and PTSD, so much loss and grief. D-Day preparations emphasize the necessity of sworn secrecy, more important than the needs of friends and lovers. While we follow their wartime exploits, Quinn deftly contrasts a post-war narrative hinting at a major cataclysm in their friendship. Not only that, Beth is committed to an asylum, convinced that a BP colleague is a traitor. And Osla’s boyfriend prepares to marry Elizabeth Windsor.

This is a long book, 650 pages, packed with people so absorbing I am having night dreams about them. These characters are built from known activities of people of the era; their intense stories merge with true events. Beth’s unit boss Dilly Knox was real. Cameo visits by figures such as Lord Mountbatten, General Montgomery, and Prime Minister Churchill are genuine. The flavour of the Forties permeates flawlessly. Quinn is a magnificent, master storyteller.

Osla

▪ Osla had been called a silly deb enough times for it to sting—a burbling belle, a champagne Shirley, a mindless Mayfair muffin. (21)

▪ Osla looked around, blinking blood out of her lashes, but couldn’t see anything through the splintered darkness but rubble and overturned tables. Humped forms lay along the floor. (132-3)

▪ “Now, Beth—when Mab and I distract your mother, you run out the back while we tell her you’re tucked up in bed with a headache.” (191)

▪ “I’m no princess, Philip,” she said at last. “You’ve already got one.” (462)

Mab

▪ Mab imagined men in headphones listening in on German radio channels, jotting Morse madly), then whirled through the various Bletchley huts so university boys could crack them open, so typing-pool girls like Mab could decode them, so bilingual girls like Osla could translate them. Like a conveyor belt at a factory. (72-3)

▪ Darling Mab, you are and always will be the Girl in the Hat. The girl who makes life worth living. (322)

▪ “You killed them,” Mab rasped. “You let go of Lucy—you let her go, and Francis went tearing off after her—” (393)

▪ I used to decode Nazi battle orders, Mab thought, and now I’m folding napkins into swans. (404)

Beth

▪ Get me out of here, the ciphered message read. You owe me. (56)

▪ “I just told my mother she was a Sunday School bully,” Beth said. (257)

▪ “There’s not much of me left over, Beth. But all of it belongs to you.” (311)

▪ In one day, she’d been stripped of everything: her job, her friends, her oath, her home, her dog, her freedom. (506)

May Cobb. The Hunting Wives. USA: Berkley/Random House, 2021.

Some days, you never know where a book’s blurb might lead you.

Sophie moved her husband Graham and son Jack to a small-ish Texas town to escape big city pace and job pressures, so she could be a housewife. It doesn’t take long to bore her. She knows one friend here, Erin, who also slightly bores her, so she takes to Facebook to scour the community for mutual interests. Sophie becomes fixated on Margot, the leading town socialite, apparently an irreverent kindred spirit. She’s introduced, she’s hooked, and she’s invited to join Margot’s exclusive Friday night gatherings: four women who love to shoot guns and drink wine—Tina, Jill, and Callie are the other forty-somethings. Drinking monumental amounts of any alcohol is the standard as they follow wherever sly Margot leads them at night. Teenage boys are one destination. It’s that distasteful.

The author must be trying to render sympathy or pity for narrator Sophie but my ship sailed on that. With a perfect husband and adorable child, Sophie risks losing them over and over thanks to Margot’s hypnotic hold on her. She castigates herself endlessly, to no avail. Teenage boy’s girlfriend is found shot to death and Sophie is Detective Flynn’s prime suspect. Someone else dies by drowning. After all the sensual adventures and self-berating, finally, a mystery with a rather good twist. Slender story, slender plot, stops short of porn, hardly worth 300 pages of heavy breathing from all involved to reach the end. Charming recipes don’t save it.

Bits

▪ It was so much more than that. I wanted to be near her. For her to notice me, too. The idea of it took my breath away. (36)

▪ My darker urges simply followed me here and are even more amplified because it’s so quiet, and sometimes so boring. (57)

▪ “Margot’s appetite for men is insatiable. You’ll see.” (74)

▪ I promise myself I’ll never do it again. What bothers me, though, is the creeping sense that whenever I’m around Margot, I’m out of control. (109)

▪ I just played freaking spin the bottle with a pair of eighteen-year-olds; this is not who I am. I need to go now, I try to convince myself. (178)

▪ The thought of Graham finding out about Jamie makes me double over, grab the counter, and fight to catch my breath. (207)

▪ I should tell Flynn about the drugging, but I don’t want to get into all of that. (292)

▪ What if Callie was spying at the window watching us, and decides to tell him? (299)