Berlin Duet
1938: English spy Harry Taverner spends the night dancing with a married woman, Jewish photographer Anna Cantrell. He is her case officer, and love doesn’t enter the picture. By 1942, the Nazis have invaded North Africa and Vichy France. Anna is hiding from her Austrian Nazi husband. Harry wants her to come in from the cold and escape with her recovering cocaine-addict mother and her two children. After the war they reunite, as Anna seeks her missing children amid the ruins of Berlin.
In 1989, the elderly Harry witnesses the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he ‘has a turn’. His daughter Elly comes to look after him. In a lucid moment, he looks at one of Anna’s old photographs, recalling the secret that links them. ‘It’s time you knew,’ he says to Elly.
The narrative jumps around in time at first, revealing the pain in people’s pasts bit by bit, building to a crescendo. Anna and her parents are artists, but her younger life is haunted by the toxicity of their relationship. And she enters into another one herself, with Ivo. The couple lives with her mother, Marion, witnessing her dysfunction. The night Anna learns more about her father, Rex, forced to see things by a drunken Marion, is burned into her heart.
As Hitler goes from bad to worse, we feel the fear. The conflict between Ivo’s Naziism and Anna’s Jewishness heats up. The rift logs one injury, then another. The ways in which the Nazi terror plays out within Anna’s family are horrifying. We see it through Anna’s eyes, then Elly’s.
This is S. W. Perry’s first venture into the 20th century, following a series of Elizabethan spy novels. It is beautifully written, encapsulating the most painful of human emotions and the devastating effect world events can have on families.
