Tightrope
April 1945, and Marian Sutro, a young woman with English-French parentage, has returned to her parents’ home in Oxford after working for the Special Operations Executive behind the German lines in France. She was captured and tortured and escaped from the Germans after being incarcerated in Ravensbrück concentration camp and now, somehow, has to find a way of moving on with her life. This is her story of her life as it is formed by the horrors of war, with the shocking back-story revealed as the narrative progresses. It is a tale of extreme bravery, despair and human treachery. Marian comes out of her ordeal as a heroine, to be decorated by the British and French states, but she does not feel herself to be an unusually brave woman, but one who has been irredeemably damaged by her experiences in France at the hands of her German opponents and captors. As the USA uses the atom bomb in Japan and the former allies polarise into the Cold War, Marian tries to make sense of this constant conflict, whilst attempting to live a normal life, impossible though that is for her. And so she is sucked back into hazardous intelligence work – balancing a precarious tightrope of clandestine confused loyalties and personal infidelity.
Marian’s story is narrated by Samuel Wareham, who was a young boy when Marian returned to Oxford, and whose families knew each other. Marian’s beauty, glamour and magnetism possessed the young Sam. Some of the events in Marian’s life have been imagined by Samuel; he does not know precisely what happened, but has deduced them from the plot of her life and later from researching the files covering her espionage activities. This is a wonderfully unfolded story, one that engages the reader in the plot and the lives of these people. Excellent, intelligent fiction.
