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    Tightrope
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    Tightrope
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    Tightrope
    Audiobook14 hours

    Tightrope

    Written by Simon Mawer

    Narrated by Gordon Griffin

    4/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. Family and friends surround her and a RAF officer attempts to bring her the normality of love and affection but she is haunted by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war helped to develop the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9781471292354
    Unavailable
    Tightrope

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    Reviews for Tightrope

    4/5

    54 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Jolly good read! Had intrigue, suspense, sex, surprise and was told from the point of view of someone who knew the protagonist. Very well done.
    • 4/5
      This is the sequel to The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (also known as Trapeze), which was a literary thriller that told the story of Marian Sutro, a young SOE agent in Nazi-occupied France. This book continues the story, starting with her capture and survival in a German camp. The first part of the story is probably the most fully realised, dealing with her return to England and the difficulties in readjusting to the mundane reality of life at home. She gets drawn into working as a secret agent, working for both the British and the Russians - this allows Mawer to explore the nuances of the post-war nuclear arms race, while toying with spy thriller genre writing. For me the whole thing worked surprisingly well - if anything this one is better than the first book.
    • 2/5
      Simon Mawer's 'Tightrope' was quite a disappointment. What initially seemed to be a sort of Alan Furst-type historical fiction of a novel became a 500 page bore of a story. Through a series of flashbacks that extended from the mid-1940s to the present, the heroics and adventures of the heroine are revealed, albeit very, very slowly.

      Alas, Mawer's novel has little of the Furst genius. It's somewhat well-written, but the tension is very slow to boil and the story is just not very interesting.
    • 4/5
      I was given an early review copy of this book to read and review by the publisher. When I received it, I realized that there was a book 1 and this was book 2. I thought it would be a disadvantage to not have read the first book in this two book series, but a lot of Marion Sutro's life during WWII is explained during various points throughout this book. The book begins in 1945 in England. The European war is all but over, and Marion has been sent home to Oxford to resume her life after spending eighteen months in Ravensbruk Concentration Camp. Before that she was held and tortured in a Nazi prison, and before that she was a young, highly trained spy from England who was working with the French resistance. Marion suffers from an extreme case of "shell shock" or what we now call PTSD and finds it difficult making the adjustment. She eventually begins to fit in and hold down a post-war job. The Cold War is just starting and Marion involves herself in the peace movement in England to prevent the widespread threat of the atomic bomb. This is a really well-written espionage book, and illustrates more clearly than most the toll that living the life of a spy has on the people involved. Marion never really discovers her true self again and she feels all but detached from her body, but her extensive training in spy craft allows her to at least have the maintain semblance of normalcy. The book is dark and brooding, as a spy's life so often is. Marion never fully recovers, and her past life and present danger lead her to make some terrible choices. Her resiliency and her skills help her cope with the consequences of those choices.
    • 4/5
      Tightrope, Simon Mawer, author; Kate Reading, narratorIn Simon Mawer’s first book about Marian Sutro, “Trapeze”, she was one of 40 young British girls enlisted to help in the war effort, working in enemy territory for the SOE (Special Operations Executive). She was flown into France where she parachuted in and assumed a French identity. She was trained as a spy in techniques of survival, but still, she was betrayed and caught, cruelly interrogated and sent to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. In this book, “Tightrope”, her story is continued, told through her eyes and the eyes of her childhood friend Samuel. More than a decade younger, he was completely devoted to her. During her brief career as a spy in France, Marian had assumed many identities, committed murder and suffered torture at the hands of the Nazis. She had learned subterfuge and knew how to lie, a skill she carried with her after she finally escaped and returned home. She used those skills in her effort to create a life for herself after what she had experienced. It was difficult. She had been grievously hurt, emotionally, physically and mentally by her treatment. Returning home, she found a world that was engaged in a Cold War and an arms race. The events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shocking and unacceptable to her. She was conflicted about the results of the war effort and was completely against the development of the bombs. She felt greater access to the technology should be made to other countries which she believed would prevent the bombs from ever being used. Her brother Ned agreed with her, and after the war, they often spoke about their feelings of frustration.Marian looked for some kind of work in order to return to the real world, but she had no real skills besides spy work. She was awarded medals and accolades for her service. When Britain recruited her again, to help with the politics of the Cold War with Russia, she accepted. She married, worked for the Peace Union and attempted to live a normal life. When Ned’s homosexuality was discovered, she was blackmailed by the Russians into helping them, as well. She became a quasi double agent. It was difficult to know to which country she felt a greater loyalty. She was an accomplished liar and constantly took advantage of the survival techniques she had been taught when trained for her drop into France.Although she was tricked and betrayed by her enemies, compromised and drugged in order to extract information from her, she still seemed to be able to rise above and meet every challenge, tricking those attempting to trap her. She was brave and strong, even if somewhat misguided. Marian had little real allegiance to anyone but herself. Secrets were her stock-in-trade and she never told the whole truth. It was hard to know which part of her story was real and which was imagined even when she confessed her sins, so to speak, to Samuel. Both Marian and Ned became involved in an effort to change the course of history. Ned never knew why his sister became involved with Russia, nor did he know the true extent of what she did or how she did it. He only knew that she compromised herself with her sexual promiscuity and naïveté, endangering her own life and possibly the lives of others, but he too, was promiscuous and naive. Marian suffered from survivor’s guilt and often had nightmares, sometimes forgetting who she was and reverting to a previous wartime identity. Searching for peace within herself, a persona she could live with, she often behaved without regard to morality. She was disloyal to her husband and viewed cheating almost as her right of passage. She frequently seemed to take unnecessary risks, playing both ends against the middle, but her ability to lie, most often saved her. Because of her training in espionage, she often noticed danger, things around her that others might not. Still she put herself in harm’s way, regardless. The story moved slowly but steadily to its end as the author placed us in the European theater through the prewar and postwar environment. The setting was realistic, the mood somber. There were shortages of food and other necessities of life. There was misery and frustration and suffering. For some, it seemed a bit easier than for others, but the adjustment back prewar life was monumental. Marian was often lost in her own imagination, sometimes not fully rational or realistic, and even as she tried to reconstruct her life, she was defeated by her memories and her training; yet it was ultimately that training that saved her.The end of the book fast forwards into the future and we find Marian, now 80 years old, living with still another identity in Switzerland. Out of the blue, Samuel, the son of her mother’s friend, reappears after 50 some years to tie up the loose ends of her life. She has never told anyone her whole story, and one has to wonder if, in the end, her confessions to Samuel were actually true. Who was the real Marian Sutro?I listened to an audio version of the book, but I also have a hard copy. It requires a slow and thoughtful reading of that time period of horror for the world. The narrator read it in a steady, smooth, and calm voice, making the revelations stark and real in their barbarism but also easier to absorb. War affected everyone in different ways. No one was unscathed, and the effort of everyone involved was based on different motivations. The reading was presented with little emotion, in a matter of fact way, which is how Marian was also portrayed. She proceeded almost like an automaton, doing what she must, planning carefully and thoughtfully, always prepared to run, always on edge on the inside but calm on the outside, as she had been taught.
    • 4/5
      At the end of Simon Mawer's last novel, the spellbinding 'The Girl Who Fell From the Sky', Marian Sutro was seized by the Gestapo, and whisked off to what we were left to presume would be a pretty ghastly fate. Marian had been an English agent in the Special Operations Executive in occupied France, acting as a courier conveying escapees to hidden airfields from which they would be flown to the relative safety of Blighty.'Tightrope' brings us up to date with Marian's story, starting with her repatriation to Britain following the end of the war. While Mawer doesn't dwell unnecessarily on the darker aspects of her incarceration and torture, we learn enough to understand what an extraordinary character Marian is (though this could scarcely have been in doubt for anyone who read the earlier volume). Acclimatisation to 'normality' is understandably difficult, and after such an adrenaline fuelled existence it is difficult for her to decompress. Her parents, who had been adviused two years previously that she was missing, presumed dead, are naturally overjoyed to have her back, though she finds their concern cloying and claustrophobic. She does fare better with her brother, Edward (known as Ned), though he has his own demons to contend with.After a formal debriefing, Marian starts working for the Anglo-French Peace Union, a left of centre organisation committed to campaigning to prevent any future war. There is a marvellous scene in which Marian secures the participation of Bertrand Russell at a debate sponsored by the Peace Union, but then finds herself taking issue with his assessment of the world situation. Having once been in the world of espionage it is difficult wholly to relinquish its grasp, and Marian finds herself being sucked back into a worlds steered by her past. There are beguiling references to historic cases, such as the conviction of Klaus Fuchs, and the defections of Burgess and Maclean.Mawer always writes well. Indeed, having now read a few of his novels I can't understand why he doesn't enjoy a higher profile - 'The Fall', The Glass Room' and 'The Girl Who Fell From the Sky' are all among my favourite books, and all display Mawer's mastery of plotting and characterisation. That was also so nearly true of this book, too. My one qualm is about the ending. Not so much the basics of what actually happened but merely the speed with which it was wrapped up. I wondered if he was fighting a losing battle against an immovable deadline - it all seemed to end unexpectedly quickly.
    • 4/5
      Espionage, the Resistance, Cold War - this book features all of that!