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Monday, September 24, 2012

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

U. S. Cover
Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 343 pages 

Reviewed by: Willow Locksley 

“We saw it coming—someone saw it coming. We were that little bit ahead of you, and you didn’t realize it. You didn’t realize how advanced the RDF [radar] system was already, or how quickly we were training people to use it, or how far we could see with it. You didn’t even realize how quickly we were building planes of our own. It is true we were outnumbered, but with RDF we saw you coming—saw the swarms of Luftwaffe aircraft even as they were leaving their bases in Occupied France, worked out how high they were flying, saw how many of them were making the raid. And that gave us time to rally. We could meet you in the air, beat you back, keep you from landing, distract you till your fuel ran out and you turned tail until the next wave. Our besieged island, alone on the edge of Europe.” 

Elizabeth Wein, author, resident of Scotland, PhD of Folklore, history enthusiast and self-described “avid flyer of small planes”, brings her knowledge of all these subjects to the pages of Code Name Verity, the stirring story of two extraordinary British girls doing their part during the dark days of World War II. 

Wartime is a time of unlikely friendships. In other circumstances, a sweet, gear-headed girl from the English countryside, and a Scottish aristocrat with a link to William Wallace and a knack for acting, would not likely cross paths, much less become best friends. But that’s exactly what happens when Maddie and Queenie, “Kittyhawk” and “Verity”, pilot and spy, meet. They make “a sensational team”, flying secretly into France by cover of night, working with the French resistance, spying, interrogating, ferrying people and information vital to the downfall of the Nazi regime… and most important of all, telling their story. 

It begins with Verity. “I have told the truth,” she swears. Captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Gestapo after she mistakenly checks the wrong side of a French street before crossing, she’s destined to disappear into the “night and fog” of the Nazi killing machine once she’s been wrung dry of information. “Write, little Scheherazade,” commands her German captor, and their deal is as simple as that: as long as she writes, she lives. “I AM A COWARD,” she begins. But rather than immediately offering up every traitorous scrap of information she can about the British War Effort, Verity begins her story with Maddie, her dearest friend, whose plane crash-landed shortly after Verity jumped out of it. 

U. K. Cover
 “Maddie had not ever practiced jumping out of a plane, but she had practiced landing broken planes more times than she could count— had, indeed, landed broken planes on plenty of occasions—and both girls knew that if it happened a thousand times Maddie would every time die with her hands on the flight controls rather than trust a blind plunge into darkness. Especially as, like most shot-down British airmen, she spoke only the most basic schoolgirl French and had no clever forged identity to fall back on in Nazi-occupied France.” 

Crafting their shared tale like the great work of literature that it is, she builds it slowly, reveals details even slower, pours out her heart and repeatedly breaks her pencil as the pain and the sorrow and the suspense overwhelm her. “This pile of paper doesn’t stack together very well,” she writes, “—pages and pages of different widths and lengths and thicknesses. I like the flute music that I had to write on at the end. I was careful with that. Of course I have had to use both sides and write over the music, but I wrote very lightly in pencil between the notes, because someone may want to play it again someday. Not Esther Lévi, whose music it was, whose classically biblical Hebrew name is written neatly at the top of each sheet; I’m not stupid enough to think she’ll ever see this music again, whoever she is. But perhaps someone else. When the bombing stops. When the tide turns. And it will.” 

Engagingly written with the insightful expertise of Elizabeth Wein, this is an unforgettable story of friendship and bravery - a work of fiction, set against the dramatic, real-life backdrop of the world’s greatest war. 

And like war in real-life, the story exists within a labyrinth of moral conundrums. When is it all right to lie? Steal? Kill? In particular, commit a mercy-kill? The plot rests heavily on an instance of so-called mercy-killing, something that tainted my overall reaction to the book, which was, up until this point, mostly positive. As a Christian, I believe it is for God alone to decide when we die. I’m not denying that, in war, choices must be made within the blink of an eye, choices that may be difficult to explain or justify afterward. I was prepared to accept this mercy-kill as another ugly consequence of fallen humanity making imperfect choices under extreme duress… until the author staunchly defended it as “the right thing” to do. 

In addition to this, the question of whether women should be in the military is often disputed within Christian circles. (And it’s not a question of whether women are smart, brave, or capable enough.) Feminism is obviously a factor in this story, though not its main purpose. It’s clearly inspired by the real-life women who did play a crucial part in the British War Effort, as pilots ferrying planes from place to place, as radio operators, resistance agents, and spies. Their courage cannot be denied, and should not be overlooked, whatever your stance on this issue. 

Last of all, a fair bit of foul language and the grim realities of Nazi-treatment of prisoners places this book solidly in the mature content category, excluding young and/or squeamish readers. 

What I loved about Code Name Verity: the historical context, the characters, and the planes. It transports the reader to that time period and offers up some ever-needed perspective on our modern day concerns. It’s not a story in perfect unison with the Christian worldview, but even so, I’m glad I read it.

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