The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

Marian Sutro #1

by Simon Mawer

Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause. Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France, her official mission to act as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must seek out family friend Clement Pelletier, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon, he is of urgent significance to her superiors. As she struggles through the strange, lethal landscape of the Occupation towards this reunion, what completes her training is the understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, World War II, War, France, Book Club

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Simon Mawer was a British author who lived in Italy.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you were to read a simplistic blurb of Simon Mawer's Trapeze - at the height of World War II, a young English-French woman trains as a spy and is dropped into Occupied France to aid the French Resistance - you might think you hold an espionage-adventure in your hands. Which, in fact, you do! But Mawer isn't after writing a Robert Ludlum thriller. He offers us a subtle, mannered take on a well-worn theme: how war forces the most ordinary amongst us to behave in the most extraordinary ways.

With prose that is distant and spare, Mawer sets the tone of isolation experienced by his young protagonist, Marian Sutro, as she is recruited and trained by the little-known British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and dropped by parachute into Southwestern France. Marian is determined to be of use and to succeed, but her motivations aren't clear. From an upper-middle class family, she has been spared the worst of the war's deprivations and has no family members in combat. Only memories of her teenage crush, a older French man who remains in Paris, tie her to her mother's homeland. She is a restless and intelligent, but hardly strikes one as a tough, street smart spy.

And as it turns out, the SOE's motives are even more shadowy. Of course, all spies are pawns. What makes Trapeze so unique - with its quiet suspense and undercurrent of dread - is how deeply Marian and the reader are drawn into the conspiracy, how inexorably Marian's nature leads her to play precisely the role that has been designed for her. And like most realistic portrayals of war, there are long stretches of lethargy, of waiting, followed by bursts of adrenalin, terror and split-second decisions that a spy's highly-trained body and mind are designed to handle.

The brevity of Marian's training is the only jarring note. Marian spends six weeks on an island off the coast of Scotland and emerges a lethal weapon. She becomes skilled in radio communication, ciphers, firearms, explosives, hand-to-hand combat -- it's a disbelief-suspending transformation from a soft, naive girl into a trained assassin with the survival instincts of a fox and the killer reactions of a tiger. Trapeze is a based on the true story, so perhaps this short training period is accurate. It's hard to imagine, really. But again, Mawer's theme runs through: do any of us really know the depth of our own character - its weakness or its power - until we are faced with desperate times?

I made a comment the other day on Twitter that I felt "character-driven" to be one of the most useless descriptors of literary fiction. To my surprise, my off-hand remark was retweeted numerous times by writers and book fans. Apparently, my words touched nerve.

Had I more than 140 characters to express myself, I would asked: if one says a novel is character-driven, what is the alternative? What well-crafted story isn't character driven? Story IS character, as much as it is plot- it is the behavior, action and reaction of the protagonist and ancillaries within and to their environment. A great story is one that wraps you in the characters' world, whether that world is a disintegrating marriage or an exploding planet of some distant universe. Or the shadowed streets and freezing lofts of Occupied Paris.

What leads me to finally reject the notion of "character-driven" as reductive is Simon Mawer's restrained Trapeze. The author does a superb job of taking fiction's inextricably-linked elements - setting, plot, character, theme - and distilling them into the essence of a perfect story.

[Flo · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book because every previous book I read by Simon Mawer was excellent. Sad to say, this book comes no where near his previous standard. The plot is plain silly, the heroine ditto and so is the writing. If you read Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan you will understand how an intelligent Britain based wartime spy story should be written. This one is about a young half British/French girl who is transferred from her position as an ordinary WAC (the British equivalent is apparently called a FANY) because of her knowledge of French and her acquaintance as a young girl with a youth who has become a famed French physicist and on whom she had an enormous crush. She's dropped into France undercover in order to persuade this physicist to come to England and join the war effort to build an atomic bomb and as well as to replace 2 crystals required by a colleague transmitting out of Paris, the crystals lodged safely in her vagina. She meets him in Paris and says probably 5 times: "I'm not a child any more." Is this an invitation? He's now married with a child. She breaks cover on every other page and although is at the end (SPOILER ALERT) compromised she insists on staying on in France to do what...I can think of nothing else except falling into the hands of the gestapo and revealing all the names of the people she has been in contact with. This cannot be the same writer as the writer of The Glass House. I do not recommend this book to anyone.

[Taury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trapeze by Simon Mawer was a slow read about the group of spies during WW2. It wasn’t good or bad. Just another WW2 book that reads similar to many others.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4 because I like the way he ended it realistically. I also appreciated the subtle building of suspense a couple of times near the end of the story. It's not the heart-pounding suspense you get from a thriller, but a much more natural feeling of dread and uncertainty while the characters are trying to act nonchalant.
I enjoyed learning about the various training exercises women went through in Scotland and England to prepare them for life as infiltrators.

But the best thing I got from the book?---> "Merde alors!"

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is book one of a duology about Marian Sutro, a young English woman who is recruited by a mysterious agency during WWII. She is wanted because of her ability to speak French like a native, and also because of her prior relationship with a man now in Paris. After enduring a rigorous training program, she is literally dropped into France, with several aliases, to carry out two missions.

Marian grows from a naive, somewhat insecure woman to one who is perfectly capable of doing whatever it takes to defeat the Germans. She may even be too self assured. There was more about Marian’s romantic entanglements than I cared to read about, but at least some of the detail was necessary to advance the plot. My suggestion is that you not read the description of book two before reading this book. I definitely wasn’t expecting how this book ended, and as soon as I finished it I immediately borrowed the second book from the library. This was not a true story, but it felt realistic and was reminiscent of factual accounts that I have read about the part played by female agents during the war.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Girl who fell from the Sky is about a young half English, half French woman who joins the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1943 and, after extensive training, is parachuted into occupied France.
Marian Sutro is beautiful, sassy, romantic and insubordinate to superior officers – so more like the 21st century heroine of an action film than a convincing portrait of a woman of her times. This though enables the author to crank up the tension in a way that wouldn’t be possible perhaps with a more realistic, cautious, self-effacing and less attractive heroine. Otherwise the research was impressive and gave a good idea of what these brave women went through. That said, the first hundred pages dealing with Marian’s training rather dragged because of his insistence to cram in all this research without really ever successfully dramatizing it. The novel greatly improved when Marian arrives in France and her deadly hide-and-seek game with the Gestapo begins. An entertaining read which gathers tension and pace half way through. Having said that I suspect those great old British films Carve Her Name with Pride and Odette were far more realistic and so moving in depicting what these brave women went through.

[Nicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hoped for more from this novel. The protagonist, Marian/Anne-Marie/Alice is a difficult character to warm to and the novel relies heavily on her being an interesting and accessible character because she's our way in. I found Marian spiky, aloof and quite irritating, especially as an agent in training. Apart from anything else, she blabs about her exciting new venture immediately after being explicitly told not to tell anyone.

The novel doesn't really take off until Marian, now known as Alice, arrives in France, but even then I found all the stuff with Clement quite tiresome, both the science and the romance. The best bits were when Alice found herself in trouble, but that was only maybe 10% of the book.

Stories about SOE agents in France are normally a honeytrap for me, but this one didn't really hit the spot. If you want to read a really good novel about a female SOE agent, read Code Name Verity. You won't be disappointed.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In war there’s a fine line between being alive and being fully human.

I enjoyed this book immensely. “Trapeze” centers around a young English woman, Marian Sutro, who’s recruited to be a spy embedded in France. Marian is the daughter of an English diplomat and a French woman. She grows up in Switzerland where her father is stationed. She’s the adored younger sister of a brilliant scientist brother. She’s also adored by and adoring of her brother’s fellow scientist Clement. Mawer quickly catches the romance of the times as well as the danger and horror. Marian goes on a crash course as one of only two women who are learning skills that will keep them alive in France and that will enable them to help the French continue their resistance. She learns that a momentary loss of awareness could cost her her life as well as the lives of the people she’s trying to help. She lives in fear. Mawer is skilled at setting impactful scenes with few words. Marian’s thoughts and predicament seem very real and Mawer’s attention to details is exquisite. You’ll feel like you’re walking the dangerous war time Paris streets right next to Marian.
Interestingly Mawer briefly ties in Leo Marks’ work as presented in Marks’ fascinating nonfiction work “Between Silk and Cyanide: a Code Makers War”*. Marks’ book is understandable to the layman and tremendously humorous while still being, literally, deadly serious.

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Silk-Cy...

[Mindy Tysinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been on my list to read for a while but it came up on a couple of different challenges lately, so I figured it must be a sign I should bump it to the top of my list. Interesting story about a young woman from England who goes to France to work with the Resistance during World War II. I enjoyed the story learning about these women that sacrificed their relative comfort and safety in London to go into a vastly different environment in order to help the war efforts. I must say it was a bit tedious. My normal complaint of many male authors applies here. It was far too detail oriented in a story where in my mind it wasn't needed. I am sure there are many others that will disagree finding it fascinating. For me though, it just wasn't needed. Still a good read though.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel was left open ended in the manner of an ongoing thriller series. The next book, Tightrope, is due out in November 2015 published by Other Press. Mawer choses a nineteen-year-old British espionage agent as his central character, based on the background of a real group of women, half-French, who are recruited and trained to infiltrate France during the Second World War on behalf of British Intelligence.

Mawer sticks to the personal in this novel, and does not venture out into the war at large: fighting, tactics, or even soldiers. We are invited to imagine the possibility of several countries’ scientists all striving to be the first to realize a nuclear option. The Americans were working on their own bomb, and the Germans were doing what they could. Occupied France had some scientists with knowledge, if not capability, and the British science regime was looking to bring in those Frenchmen to aid their efforts while keeping those secrets from the Germans.

We get a detailed look at the women’s recruitment, training in Scotland, and deployment in France. They were so young: perhaps that made them braver. Some were better at the spycraft than others and they quickly learned to pick those they admired when possible on assignments. Others of their team they learned to be wary of, but when wariness wasn’t enough, they had to treat their teammates like the explosive charges they were, at any moment threatening to blow their cover.

The Second World War is a convenient catalyst to writers and filmmakers because it throws human desire and capability into extremis. Mawer attempts to show the ordinary daily life of a spy: lots of waiting punctuated by shattering terror. Mawer’s research on the work of preparation and infiltration was capable enough, but I wasn’t completely convinced by his female lead. I understand the excitement generated by imagining real young women being dropped by parachute into France in the dead of night, but somehow that excitement did not communicate itself to me, perhaps because the ground is thoroughly churned and picked over for nuggets. Although Mawer did a marvelous job with his female-centered World War II novel The Glass Room, this novel left me wondering why he chose to use a female central character.

Marian’s name changes throughout the novel, to Anne-Marie, to Alice, to Laurence. Her skills and motivations change also, becoming more practiced, seasoned, and hardened with each iteration of her identity. But because the novel is so intensely personal, we might expect to share more of her secret internal thoughts--about her lovers, about her colleagues--rather than just the face she shows to the world. Mawer does this is some extent, but I just wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t have done that job, which is why I may have needed more clarity. Perhaps there are people out there who do not have agonized internal conversations about who their duplicitous lives as spies are helping.

Maybe it was just like Mawer says: a young woman accepts a commission to risk her life undercover overseas without even knowing which division of British Intelligence she worked for. Maybe that’s why they needed them young. However interesting it is to imagine such a wildly impetuous jump into the deep end--meeting a former boyfriend and nuclear scientist in Paris, and trying to get him to fly to Britain without much convincing dialogue--I find it infinitely more gratifying to read about, work with, and follow someone with a little more maturity and doubt.

But I have read so much about the Second World War that it takes some really spectacular writing and imagining to bring me anything new. I was the one who thought All the Light We Cannot See was a Young Adult title. So don’t listen to me. If espionage is your thing, this may be just the ticket. But read it now, so you can move on to Tightrope when it comes out in November.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marian Sutro is a young woman from Geneva, with an English father and a French mother. It is wartime and Marian is in London, when she is approached about whether she would undertake a secret mission in occupied France. Although she knows she should be afraid, Marian is exhilarated by the thought. We travel with her through training and see her learn how to use morse code, how to shoot a weapon and kill a man. Through it all, though, she is still a young woman, who is coming to terms with herself and her feelings. In England she meets a young Frenchman, Benoit, who is also travelling to France. However, she is also asked to try to meet up with Clement Pelletier, a French scientist and friend of her brother, Ned. There is top secret research being carried out in England and those involved want to recruit Clement for the Allies. When she was young, Marian had a crush on her brother’s older friend and now she finds herself torn and conflicted emotionally, as she heads into the unknown.

France has changed when Marian parachutes into occupied territory, with a new alias and a whole new set of skills. She begins as a courier, helping the Resistance and then comes the call to go Paris. Marian heads into danger, as she has to meet a former colleague she trained with and convince Clement Pelletier to leave the country. As she leaves the country for the city, she is constantly on alert; having to contact, and trust, people with her life. Can she complete her mission without being compromised? This is a thrilling wartime story of betrayal, bravery and of a young woman who discovers she can do so much more than she believed possible.

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky – published in the US as Trapeze - is a thriller, a spy story, a coming of age narrative, a tale of sexual awakening, of self-discovery, of the terrors of working under an assumed name in a land occupied by a malign presence. The life that it has is all that it has, and it’s yours and yours and yours! Is it mine? The honest answer is that I’m not at all sure.

It’s the first novel I’ve read by Simon Mawer, though his much lauded The Glass Room is in my collection and begging my attention. The Girl in question is Marian Sutro, plucked from obscurity to become an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British wartime organisation set up, amongst other things, to aid local resistance movements in Europe against the Nazi occupiers.

Marian’s appeal, like so many of the real women who worked for SOE, is that she is fluent in French. But as there are secrets within secrets and agencies within agencies, her additional appeal is that she happens to be on past familiar terms with a French nuclear scientist by the name of Clément Pelletier. Living in Paris, he is wanted by those stumbling towards the creation of an atomic bomb.

After training in all sorts of secret agent techniques, she is dropped from the sky into south-west France, there to work with the resistance. That’s dangerous enough, but her ultimate task is even more perilous – she has to go to Paris, an anxious city in the grip of hunger and in the grip of fear.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is a good little book with a good big book struggling to get out and not quite making it. I honestly don’t know why I picked it up now, other than for a spot of undemanding holiday reading. Certainly the subject matter interests me, the stories of the remarkable women of SOE, women like Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom and Anne-Marie Walters, known simply as Colette, to whom the novel is dedicated. But chiefly what I think I was looking for was an understanding of what it was like to live under extreme conditions, an understanding of what Paris was like during the occupation. I was looking for something exceptional. There are exceptional parts which makes the unexceptional all the more striking.

Mawer’s descriptive power is excellent at points. The Paris scenes are full of mounting, heart-pounding tension. I give you one passage which I found particularly striking:

An old man peers out from behind a heap of used clothes. He’s as wrinkled as a walnut and wears a woollen cap on his head that makes her think of the tumbrels that rolled through the city during the Terror. This is the new terror, with new myths and new nightmares.

Indeed there are. This is not a city to stop and stare, for if one does someone else stops and stares right back; if you gaze into the abyss the abyss will gaze back into you. This is not a city for the unprepared or the unwary. The atmosphere of tension and dread is constructed with considerable skill but, alas, only a fairly small part of the book is set in the streets of Paris. Just as much time is spent on Marian’s soulful and, at points, tiresome reunion with Clément. For a scientist of such importance he is a person in whom the Nazis take surprisingly little interest.

Mawer is good on the detail of espionage. I feel sure that he carried out a lot of research on techniques and training. Clearly in this sort of work detail is everything, the narrow margin between life and death. Marian goes to France as Alice, into a darker Wonderland. Amongst other things she is told not to ask for sugar for her coffee because there isn’t any. Such a request would mark her out as a stranger. Surprisingly, though, she is not told to avoid smoking on her own – something she only discovers when she arrives –, because women did not get a tobacco ration.

Mawer would do well himself to pay closer attention to detail. At one point his God-like narrator says the various materials dropped by the RAF to the resistance was like “one of those cargo cults in the Pacific islands.” Yes, sure, but that is not a contemporary perspective. The cults he is referring to are a post-war phenomenon. This comment marks him out as a stranger!

I don’t want to give too much away in spoilers but I feel sure that the real SOE must have been much more thorough in their vetting and training. Speaking French like a native simply would not have been enough. Early on I spotted Yvette as an obvious weak link, a girl who volunteers simply because she wants to go home. Marian befriends her but it was to be a particularly dangerous friendship. One would have to be a fool not to know the reason why eyes were turned on Marian on her second visit to Paris. He task was to get Clément and Clément alone. All other considerations should have been abandoned. Tragically for her they were not.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is a rattling good yarn when it isn’t a boring digression into the ins and outs of Marian’s emotional and sex life. There is colour but not enough. There is character but not enough. There is tension, real tension at points, but not enough. Marian’s first encounter with the Germans, for example, which should have been a moment of high anxiety, is curiously flat.

I also wonder if Mawer was getting a bit tired towards the end because the scene where his heroine and Clément part is a commendable exercise in bathos and cliché! What happens afterwards is sad but for me not unexpected. She should have left when she had the chance. I would have. It was the right thing to do. She should have been ordered out, a danger to herself and everyone she worked with.

I’m sounding a bit too negative. I really don’t want to give you the impression that I did not enjoy this book because I did…up to a point. It’s a good read, not a great one. That’s the problem: I was expecting more. The Glass Room I hope will be more.

[Huw Rhys · Rating 1 out of 5]

On the face of it, this is a WW2 espionage story about a female agent operating in France. Had the author simply stuck to this idea, we may have been given a better result.

As it is, we have a slow, turgid novel which barely gets going at all until the last few chapters, wrapped up in a load of completely inappropriate and often embarrassing, florid passages.

Firstly, to begin to appreciate much of this extraneous verbiage, the reader needs to be not only fluent in French, but au fait with French slang. If long, and seemingly important passages from another language are going to be used in a book, then they need to be explained. The author surely realizes this, as at one point, he invokes some (again, unnecessary) German language into the narrative, which is neatly translated so that the impact of the words aren't lost on the reader. But using half a dozen different slang words for German soldiers, with little or no explanation, simply ends up confusing the reader, adding yet another diversion away from the main plot.

Then there are the strange English words introduced as well. "Fasty" is one such word. Was it a typo? Was it meant to be like "Fastish", as in "rapidly"? Or was it something to do with not eating? Impossible to tell - but yet another unnecessary distraction.

Then there is the constant "poorly written sex pieces" - most of which is again completely and utterly unnecessary to the plot, and is usually completely embarrassing even when reading it in private. The thought of even going into detail in illustrating some of this stuff is stomach churning in itself – it’s stuff I’d sooner forget, but I fear that some of it will remain as an unpleasant image in my mind’s eye for far too long.

On a broader level, the characters are paper thin, as well as being all quite unsavoury – it really is difficult to empathise with any of them, particularly our main protagonist. The difficulty is further exacerbated by the fact that the plot goes to great lengths to try and hammer home how our character is trained to behave by her spymasters – and then she almost immediately goes out and acts in an opposite way, with no reflection at all on her misdoings. Is the author trying to make too clever a point here (another possibly recurring theme throughout this dreadful novel) or is it just sloppy writing?

Then there is completely inappropriate use of metaphor and imagery. At one stage he invokes a “turd at the backside of an elegant old lady”. Interesting imagery. To what could he be referring to? Would you believe that he was simply talking about a brown van parked outside the back of a college? And so the complete embarrassment goes on.

Even the ending is a straight lift from one of the best known WW2 escape films. Not even a pretence to change much of the detail. Another piece of deep and meaningful imagery? No, by this stage you know it’s just sloppy, lazy writing, confirming finally the growing sense of unease and disbelief that any editor has allowed 90% of this book to be printed.

A real shocker.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 Stars - 3 Stars - 4 Stars

Is it me or is it the book?

At the outset I was very interested in reading Trapeze as it promised a peek into ta little known piece of World War II history --a fictionalized account of the 39 women, members of The French Section of the Special Operative Executive.

As someone who has tandem jumped and who also is the niece of a World War II parachutist who died doing just that during the Battle of the Bulge, I was intrigued by the thought of these women who parachuted into danger during the war.

4 Stars for the characterization of Marian, Alice, Ann-Marie, Laurence.
I love strong female characters with a mission.

4 Stars for Marian's recruitment and the working of the Inter-Service Research Bureau

4 Stars for the strong female voice, dialog, espionage, writing and the plot.

3 Stars as somewhere in the middle I started getting bored, perhaps just me, and wanted the author to get to the point.

4 Stars for the last pages when the the action picked up and climaxed in a fitting finish.

Be certain to search for and read the true accounts that inspired this book.

[trish · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise was fascinating and true -- young women who had volunteered for low-level support roles in WWII-era Britain were secretly tapped to infiltrate Nazi-occupied France as spies.

This book could have been a great glimpse into a covert operation, but unfortunately it fell flat. The main character never developed, really, and the supporting characters were never more than paper-doll men.

It told me what happened instead of showed me, to the point where the last few paragraphs were literally a first-person "what if I had done this? what if I had done that" list of plot points.

I enjoyed the backdrop this book was set against, but the plot alone couldn't save this story.

[robin friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Squirrel

Simon Mawer's historical novel "Trapeze" (2012) struggles to combine elements of a spy story, a coming of age novel and a romance. Set during WW II, the book describes the French Section of the Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) which sent 39 young women into the field in France between May 1941 and September 1944. Mawer's chief character Marian Sutro, 19, is one of these women. She assumes many aliases in the course of the book. Many children of all places and times acquire an affectionately embarrassing nickname that they spend adulthood trying to live down. In Marian's case, her family and friends called her "Squirrel", a moniker her actions in this story show she does not deserve. Besides the childhood nickname, the novel makes frequent and heavy-handed allusions to Alice and Through the Looking Glass. The book presents the mad, topsy-turvy world of WW II occupation and of the spy in which nothing is as it seems.

The book describes Marian's recruitment and training into the SOE. Before that time, Marian held another job in Britain's war effort and was recruited initially due to her fluency in French. The British spy apparatus, of course, knew what it was about and had acquired detailed knowledge of Marian's character and potentialities. Mawer describes in detail Marian's training in espionage and violence as she prepares to be dropped by parachute into France to undertake several secret, sensitive missions. Along the way, one of her trainers advises that her chances of survival were perhaps 50-50. The larger portion of the book describes Marian's mission as a spy in Paris and in rural France.

The book is also a coming of age story. Marian tends toward introspection, and Mawer spends a great deal of time on her thoughts and on exploring her character and her reactions to the dangerous mission in which she finds herself. The book includes long flashbacks to Marian's childhood. As her mission progresses, Marian changes and reacts, sometimes resourcefully, sometimes less so, to her role as a spy in wartime France. The book shows her changing from an immature young woman just out of school to a hard, tough spy with the capability, among other things, of killing.

Mawer has also written a romance. As an adolescent of 15, Marian had a developing relationship with a man ten years her senior, Clement, a gifted theoretical physicist. Clement was a friend of Marian's older brother, Ned, also a highly-regarded physicist. Part of Marian's mission in France is to use her charms and influence to bring Clement back from a research center in Paris to Britain to join other physicists in working on the atomic bomb. This mission requires Marian to sort out the nature of her feelings for Clement. During her training to become a spy, Marian also became attracted to a young soldier and fellow spy, Benoit, who parachutes out of the plane with her in the spying mission to France.

The book has problems of pacing and problems of clutter. The various threads of the book frequently work at cross-purposes. As a genre novel and spy story, the book needs a focus on action, suspense, and dramatic tension. Although there are effective moments, on the whole the story is level and flat and often tedious. It moves slowly and it meanders, probably because Mawer is trying to tell too many stories at once. The novel comes to life towards the end but too late to save the work. The coming of age and romance aspects of the story need a more introspective approach than a spy novel. These components of the book also were indifferently done and tended to work against the spy story. I tried to follow Marian and her spying missions. The introspective character development and the story of her relationships with the two young men failed to carry conviction.

Other works have been written about women in dangerous spying missions during WW II, but the availability of other novels with this theme would not preempt another book, such as "Trapeze", if it were well done. The trouble is that the story and characters drag. Like so many young people and some older people as well, the novel never fully decides on what it wants to be.

Robin Friedman

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some novels should come with an advisory: “Readers will not get anything done until they have completed this book.” Trapeze by Simon Mawer is desperately in need of that label. Readers are immediately drawn into this novel by its main character, Marian Sutro, a young woman wondering what her place is in the fighting of World War II. Marian is the daughter of an English father and a French mother, and is bilingual, making her the perfect addition to the French Section of the Special Operations Executive, or the SOE. The SOE was an actual Operation that sent thirty-nine women into the field between May 1941 and September 1944. Mawer has taken this fact and created an unforgettable heroine and a war story filled with spies and intrigue. Marian is put through rigorous training and is to be dropped into France when she is questioned by two gentlemen who seem to be privy to personal details of her past. Her girlhood crush and a longtime friend of the family, Clement Pelletier is still in Paris, where he is still working as a physicist. As the war escalates it becomes evident that science will somehow play a role in ending the war, and Pelletier is wanted in England by the Allies. Marian’s initial mission of being dropped into Southern France to assist the Resistance now takes on a more dangerous and emotional element. Trapeze is finely crafted and well researched, fast paced and full of unexpected plot twists, and will surely have readers on the edge of their seat until the final page.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marian Sutro (the Geneva born daughter of a British diplomat and a Frenchwoman) is recruited by the British Special Operations Executive to work in France in 1941. As well as her training and role as a secret agent a separate part of the Secret Service also want her to take a message to Clement Pelletier, a research physicist. Clement was friends with her older brother – Ned also a research physicist but she and Clement had a burgeoning relationship pre-war despite her being only 15 and he 10 years older. Ned reveals to her that both he and Clement are working on an atomic bomb and the allies need him to join the UK efforts.

Mixed book: a reasonably easy but also engrossing read without being thrilling/consuming; not without literary merit in the dialogue, the sense of time and place; complex relationships (her renewed relationship with Clement has lots of nuances - her older which makes their relationship easier but unsettles him, him married but unhappily so, in the War environment of not worrying about consequences but with the responsibility of her training and mission – and isn’t easily resolved); a theme of atomic bombs whose treatment as an implicit and even explicit in the character’s discussions literary allusion (e.g. the uncertainty principle, collapsing wave functions, chain reactions) is one level original for a thriller but which also seems to go over some old ground (eg Copenhagen).

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trapeze is a better title than The Girl Who Fell from the Sky which is just a bit silly. The quote on the front cover of my edition says "As good as Le Carre." No, it's not. Not even close and not a spy story so I don't understand the analogy.

After a strong start when we learn about the way Special Ops trained recruits, the book lulls into an account of life undercover in France which isn't very exciting. The last third is full of suspense though which is why I have given it 4 stars rather than 3. Marian Sutro, the main character, has several identities and this becomes confusing when Mawer, writing in the third person, swaps between them but it works as a device to define the schizophrenia Marian experiences as the story lurches towards its unpredictable ending. Not Mawer's best novel by far but still a very good read and as well researched as ever.

[honeybee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This whole book felt shallow. I was looking farward details! which where missing in abundance! The author just scoots around the idea of some young women becoming a spy, missing out all of the training in any depth, reducing it to "we did an assault course that day" and "later we did monkey bars". The whole book reads more like a plot outline then an actual book. Also, if i have to hear the line "he laughed that *insert word here, such as "throaty"/"russion"/or"deep" Laugh" AGAIN i will go crazy. Repetitive writing too? its a one star from me.

[Nofreeusernames Nofreeusernames · Rating 5 out of 5]

Příběh ženy, která kvůli válce přestala být dívkou. Té, která je několika ženami najednou a neví, kterou je ve skutečnosti. Čtěte celou recenzi: http://bit.ly/recenze-divka-ktera-spa...

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read. The kind of thing Alan Furst would have written if he were less of a hack. A WWII noir spy thriller. But Mawer is a fine writer.

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hovered between three and four stars all night. Tossing and turning in bed after I'd finished the last page. I suppose this is not a book to finish just before bedtime, as it did not sit well. First off, it's a total cliffhanger which if doing a trilogy or a series I enjoy. It usually makes me excited to read the next, but this was more flat than exciting. I was more disappointed.

Marian Sutro, a young woman chosen by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) to be trained and sent to France as a spy is an interesting woman. She is not flat by all means. In fact she is rather interesting, and very intricate. She has layers that are not uncovered fully throughout the book but I believe this builds a wonderful character, and allows you to grow with them as they grow.

All of the relationships in the book minus the one with Clement were 5-star. Her interactions with Benoit, Yvette and Ned kept the book alive for me. I wanted to know more. Who is Yvette? What are her real qualities? Can Marian love Benoit? Can Benoit love Marian? It was all a bit of a roller coaster, but Marian seemed to mesh well with these characters. It seemed to carry the story in an interesting way, rather than falling short and making me feel full of nothing the way the interactions with Clement were. Clement was my real disappointment.

Why did Marian not feel more when revealed that he was married with a child? Why did this not break her down the way it should have? Why did Clement not say more... about Marian, rather than acting like a child about her being sent away to school... it seemed sloppy. As if the author had a grand plan in place for Marian and Clement, but had run away with the wonderful idea of Marian and Benoit. I wanted more angst, but was left feeling bitterly cold. Marian was never depicted as bitterly cold. A bit stoic at times, but when description of Clement came to mind she was bubbly, happy, almost giddy. The marriage of Clement should have been devastating. The advances Clement made should have been more effective, instead of Marian claiming she was no longer a child a hundred times. This is the point of the book I started to get disappointed, and began over-analyzing all the other pieces.

The training part of the story was good, but could have been more exciting. I think Simon Mawer is an excellent writer with a gift of description, though does not use it in times that are important. I do not care to know all the details of a Paris street that has no meaning. I want to know more about espionage training, how they could turn such a head-strong, stubborn woman such as Marian into a rather tough, and scary woman with an excellent gift of concealment.

In addition, once placed in France, it felt as though Marian didn't do very much. The description of her first parachutage was good, interesting and exciting but is that all she did once placed? Surely, the SOE wasn't sending women and men over to do nothing all day? This is a fundamental flaw of the book, that although could mean nothing should the rest of the book hold-up, did not sit well with me in the end. We spent more time learning how to travel and not look scared than knowing what it was that Marian actually did.

Lastly, I was in absolute shock at the end. I supposed it was nice to be thrilled by Marian's actions, but there was no hint, no glimmer of her pretending to go with Clement and then jumping the plane at the last second. There was no inclination that Marian had felt the need to do that. It was shocking, and unsettling to say the least. I was not at all impressed, and then the last few pages where a whirlwind of confusion. Simon Mawer lost his excellent skill of description, and fell short with coded meanings and difficult plot advancement.

Overall - I think this was a good book. Well written characters, and interesting plot but I am not sure if I could read a sequel. I might just to see if Simon had redeemed himself, as a lot of series novels are not good in the beginning but good enough to interest you and this is definitely an interesting read. I enjoyed the characters more than anything else in the book and would enjoy to find Simon has developed them more. Not sure I would recommend this to others, which is why I have given it a 3 star in the end but I supposed this could change with the continuation of the series.

For now, I will leave you with my long thought-out review of Trapeze.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is the second world war and Marion who is in the services is selected by SOE as she can speak fluent French. She is a little reluctant to join at first, but decides that she will. She joins the commandos on their training course with one other woman, and passes with flying colours. After a couple of other courses, including getting her wings, she is ready for her first assignment in France.

She is approached by another secret organisation that want her to meet with an old flame called Clement in Paris. he is working on atomic research, and the British want him to defect. She is parachuted into France, with a man called Benoit and is met by the resistance and is immersed into the local community awaiting the call from London. Shortly after that, she gets the call and she is to delivery some crystals to another agent in Paris.

She meets the other agent in Paris, Yvette, who is living in terror as she thinks her cover is blown, and meets with Clement. She is slightly shocked to find that he is married now, but starts trying to persuade him to come to the UK. As the Nazi authorities close in on her, she realises that every wrong step could be fatal.

Overall is isn't a bad spy thriller. It is loosely based on a female spy called Anne-Marie, who was active during the Nazi occupation of France. It is a little predictable at times, and the beginning is quite slow paced whilst she undergoes training. The pace really does lift at the end, but it doesn't have the subtlety and darker elements that some one like Le Carre has. Ok, but not great.

[Alice Meloy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this now novel from Simon Mawer after his excellent The Glass Room, I was reminded of how I felt reading Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day after The Sparrow and Thread of Grace: did someone else write this novel or is it perhaps a resurrected earlier work? It's not a bad novel, but it doesn't measure up to the depth of The Glass Room. Three and a half years into the Second World War, a young British woman is recommended for special espionage work in France. Her mother is French, and Marian grew up in France and Switzerland, so she's perfect for the assignment. She goes into it knowing the dangers, and, in fact, seems to relish the risks she has to take. Mawer does a good job building suspense, and I have to say that the book is definitely a page turner. But I'm not sure that he does an effective job with the female voice. A slightly different take on WWII, and if book clubs haven't had their fill of the war yet, this one might go over well.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was on the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2013 and the follow-up, Tightrope, which continues Marian’s story and which I read in 2018 (I know, wrong order) won The Walter Scott Prize in 2016. I listened to the audiobook version superbly narrated by Anna Bentinck. Although I’m no expert, her French pronunciation sounded pretty flawless to me.

The book opens in dramatic style with Marian becoming literally the girl who fell from the sky. Thereafter the reader is taken back in time to Marian’s initial recruitment to a very shadowy organization whose name is not shared even with recruits. Along with others, Marion undergoes a rigorous training programme, the details of which I found absolutely fascinating. The training includes the tradecraft required for an agent going undercover in enemy territory, in this case occupied France.

Once in France, Marian adopts a series of cover names and, through her eyes, we witness the constant fear of putting a foot wrong, of having your cover blown as a result of the smallest error or betrayal by another, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The events described in the book vividly illustrate the courage of those who were part of the Resistance, risking their lives every day. The tension never lets up and I found the whole story absolutely gripping.

[Kirsty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review written in 2012.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is Simon Mawer’s ninth novel. The author was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2009 for The Glass Room. This novel was inspired by 39 women who were trained as secret agents by the French section of the Special Operations Executive between 1941 and 1944. Mawer views these women and their war efforts as ‘remarkable’.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky launches into the action straight away. The woman in the prologue, at first unnamed, is ‘trussed like a piece of baggage’ and ‘battered by noise’ in an aircraft which she soon jumps from with her parachute. This woman transpires to be Marian Sutro, a fictional character and the main focus of the novel.

When the reader is first introduced to Marian, she is given a posting in France ‘of enormous value to the war effort’. As a young woman, she is extremely excited by the prospect of such undercover work, and is told that ‘it is not that your work is a secret; your whole life is a secret’. As the novel progresses, Marian takes on several different personas, switching from one identity to the next as the situations around her change.

Despite having to sign the Official Secrets Act, Marian treats her job with mirth, not quite realising the seriousness of her situation. She seems not to care who she utters her secret to, in fact. First of all she informs her brother Ned about exactly where she is going to be posted and the information she learnt whilst training in Scotland – how to use weapons and Morse code, for example. She is also happy to disclose such information to complete strangers whom she meets on a whim. These traits seem most unlikely to be found in a woman who undertook such duties, and it is close to impossible to picture such a blasé character in such a position in the context of World War Two. As a result, Marian is not a believable character, and it is difficult for the reader to feel any compassion whatsoever for her.

Throughout, the third person perspective has been used and the book has been split into relatively short sections. Several qualms can be identified throughout the book. The descriptions which Mawer gives of Marian do not built up to create a unified persona. At first, she is ‘jejune, pallid, with awkward limbs and hips’ and, at twenty years old she is seen as little more than a child. Barely a few weeks go by before she is seen by all and sundry as ‘beautiful’ and irresistible, however, which does not really gel. Any instances of shouting within the novel is presented in capital letters at first, but this technique abruptly stops. This makes it feel as though there is little cohesion between the first chapter and the rest of the book. Several of the dialogue exchanges also use language and phrases which feel a little too modern for the period.

Some of the sentences throughout do seem rather long, but on the whole the prose is carefully written. In places, these long sentences serve to build up the pace, particularly in the first chapter. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky has clearly been well researched and is rather geographically precise, but some elements do not seem to fit in the overall framework of the novel. The writing itself is not bad by any means, but due to the simplicity of language which is often used and the repetition of several phrases throughout, it lacks depth. As a result, the book does not quite come to life for the reader.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is described as ‘a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love’. Sadly, this description is more exciting than the novel itself. Whilst some elements of it are interesting, there is nothing original, both in terms of plot or characterisation, in the novel. Rather, it follows the structure and occurrences of many other spy novels set in the Second World War. The ending too feels incredibly abrupt, giving the entirety of the novel an unfinished feel.

[thewanderingjew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on the true story of a group of young women who were recruited in Britain, during WWII, to serve in the French Division of The Special Operations Executive, the book is filled with historic facts about their training, innocence and bravery in the face of enormous danger. The SOE trained these women for espionage and all types of weapon use. Dropped into France, in secret, they became different people, and they performed whatever assignments they were given, often completely on their own, facing untold danger. Many did not survive the effort.
The author, Simon Mawer, introduces us to Marian Sutro when she is a young girl of 19. A member of the WAF, she is recruited into this spy machine and parachuted into France with several new identities. She enters the maelstrom of war, young and a bit naïve, however, she is forced to mature quickly. She and other recruits become romantically involved with each other, although it is against regulations, so in addition to this exciting tale of espionage, there are forbidden romantic liaisons and love stories taking place. Romance can fog the mind and compromise their ability to think clearly, but the constant danger makes them behave carelessly and foolishly sometimes. There is always so much at stake; this behavior becomes a release for tension. Marian’s mission is of the highest priority and her life is always in danger. There is no shortage of mystery or intrigue. We witness murder and betrayal, fear and courage, in the face of monumental danger. If caught, awful consequences await them.
This historic piece of fiction, about a group of people engaged in the effort to end World War II that I had never heard about before, is really engaging and eye opening. Working alongside freedom fighters who often believed that the women were unworthy of the task, whose beauty was distracting, they must nevertheless prove themselves and do their job in the face of the resistance, rudeness, and mistrust.
I particularly liked the descriptive use of language. It made what might have been a mundane spy story, leap off the page. There was little use of crude language, inappropriate sex and whatever other contrivance other writers of late seem to be wont to do; instead, Mawer uses the language effectively to tell the story by creating images that are revealing. For instance, body odor is the scent from an armpit, an image the reader can appreciate.
I found the reader of this audio to be excellent. Her vocal expression made the content clear. Her use of voices brought the characters to life and her tone seemed pitch perfect to me.

[Dolf Patijn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a riveting Second World War espionage novel with a strong, female protagonist. In WW II it wasn't just men who fought and women doing office jobs and nursing because there were women who played an important role in occupied countries. In the Netherlands there were girls like Hannie Schaft (the girl with the red hair). Theun de Vries wrote a book about this courier for the Dutch resistance. In Germany there was Sophie Scholl, one of the leaders of the White Rose resistance group. In France 15 to 20 % of the resistance fighters were female but only a few were personally honoured like Marinette Menut, Simone Segouin, Bertie Albrecht, Delphine Aigle and Claude Rodier.

The year is 1943. The protagonist in "The Girl Who Fell From The Sky" is Marian Sutro, a woman with an English father and French mother who lives in England and serves with the WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) as a plotter in an operations room. Because she speaks French fluently, she is asked to train as an agent and go into France to help the resistance.

The books starts with Marian on the plane, ready to be dropped over France, but then moves back in time to when she was approached and did her training. The first part of the book is taken up with her training and gives us time to get to know Marian a bit better and gives an insight in wartime British intelligence. It gets more exciting when she's dropped over France, starts her mission and finds out that her training hasn't completely prepared her for the real-life situation in an occupied country. The tension becomes palpable and it becomes hard to put the book down.

This seems like a straightforward, well-crafted spy thriller, but it is also a novel about the choices that people make, taking responsibility, getting to know your own strengths and weaknesses and putting your own interests aside for a greater good, despite the risks.

Simon Mawer has a nice style of writing and doesn't overdramatise. The story is well-researched and although he could have elaborated a bit more about life in occupied France and let tension built up for a bit longer, he knows how to evoke an atmosphere of wartime France in a few, well-chosen occurrences and incidents which makes for a believable story and an unputdownable book.

NB: Simon Mawer wrote a second book about the same protagonist called Tightrope, which was published in 2015.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recently I had a conversation with someone about the Holocaust; we agreed that those with direct experience would be gone in the next 10-15 years, and that the memories of those with direct experience were (now) fading or being lost to old age. So it's not surprising that the children of those people are striving to keep those memories alive and to honor their parents' experience.

In this case, the author is writing (loosely) about a friend of her parents, a woman who worked for the Special Operations Executive in France, helping the Resistance. Marian/Anne-Marie/Alice is working in the WAAF when she receives a letter asking her to come to a meeting - that meeting leads to a position in the SEO, training in armed combat, destruction, sabotage, espionage, resisting interrogation and Morse code, and ultimately an assignment in France as a sort of courier for the resistance. In addition to her SEO role, she's also been asked to meet with, and convince, her old crush, Clement Pelletier, now working as a physicist in Paris, working on a new type of bomb (the science of the bomb is explained, as is Shrodinger's cat, but not collapsing the wave function).

As with any good spy novel, there's betrayal and tension, but this is slower paced than most in that genre. The psychological side isn't as intense, either. It was also a little odd to not get a better feel for what she did in the south of France - most of the action once she's in France is centered on her time in Paris, which is too bad as I think more about the courier work would have given us more of a flavor of what life was like during that time (something that I think most readers don't have, whereas life in Paris has been covered in other novels and movies).

ARC provided by publisher.