The Dark of the Moon
Philly Delaney is in her nineties. Her youthful career included a stint as an air transport pilot during World War II, reassignment to the code-breaking team at Bletchley Park under Alan Turing, and two dangerous missions to France as an agent of British intelligence. The second one cost her a leg. The war cost her her young husband Ben, an RAF pilot who never came back from his last mission. The overpowering sadness of not knowing what happened has shadowed her life. In the present day, she’s telling her story to a writer who thinks she would make the subject of a good book, and to the writer’s teenage son, Finn, whose autism makes him a puzzle to everyone but himself.
The novel is told in alternating first-person narratives by Philly herself and by Finn, who is the most fully realized character in the novel. Finn’s voice comes through clearly as he sorts out ways to function in a world that is too much for him all the time, while descriptions of coding and codebreaking inspire him to apply that mathematical process of deduction to the search for Ben. Philly’s voice is more prosaic, a bit preachy as she tells us the conclusions she comes to about life and love while sorting out all of her host family’s problems with gentle wisdom. There are places where the text could have used a firmer editorial hand, including an unnecessary prologue that doesn’t advance the plot and seems to serve only as a cumbersome way to insert the word “enigma.”
The novel is well researched, however, and full of fascinating information about codebreaking and the French resistance, and Finn’s voice makes it come alive.
