"In wartime," Winston Churchill wrote, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." For Britain's counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable-a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor. The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent: Catherine Blake, a beautiful widow of a war hero, a hospital volunteer-and a Nazi spy under direct orders from Hitler to uncover the Allied plans for D-Day...
Customer Review: A D-Day Nazi-Allied Forces Espionage Thriller
"The Unlikely Spy" is a very good WWII espionage spy thriller. It's long - 725 pages, but rarely does it drag, and most of the time the story is interesting, intriguing, well-crafted, and often compelling. There are only a few instances of a solution to a dilemma faced by one of the characters that is too pat or too contrived (a problem often found in novels such as this). The characters, for the most part, remain true to their personality, training and mission.
Only the two main German spies (Horst and Anna) fall out of their roles glaringly one or two times: one such moment is the unfortunate "street" fight with a local Brit that Horst gets himself into; the other is when Anna begins to doubt herself, her mission, herself, and begins to gain a conscience. These two German spies are clever, well-trained and effective in what they do, and even when they are humanly inconsistent, they are convincing and exceptional. One does not root for them, but one does rather admire them. Anna, in particular, is complex and complicated, a beautiful woman with a somewhat tortured past. But she has been trained to kill and kill she does.
The one American (Peter) is true to his character almost unfailingly, as are the British main characters, especially the very well-drawn likeable Vicary and the more mysterious cad Boothby.
The real-life historical figures, Eisenhower, Churchill and all the usual German demons (like Canaris, Himmler, and Hitler) play big to small roles, as is appropriate for the story, except for the main German background player, Major Vogel who runs Anna, whom he placed in Britain in 1938, 6 years before she was needed by the 3rd Reich to unravel allied plans for D-Day in early 1944.
It's all about D-Day, and this story proved a timely read here in June 2009 during the days leading up to and after the recent 65th anniversary ceremony celebrating the costly but successful Allied invasion of France in 1944. This story revolves around German and Allied hand-wringing over where and when the Allied invasion would occur. Would the Germans discover that it would occur at Normandy --- or as the Allies wanted them to believe - at Calais? That is the entire nexus of the story.
In the end, I liked this book better than (though it is greatly different from) Michael Dobbs' books about Churchill in the same time period (see "Never Surrender"). Silva apparently doesn't have the pressure to try to teach history, except as it is incidentally important to his story. Then he gets it right. But make no mistake: this is fiction - as are all of Dobbs' works.
The plot is complicated (but not too complex), and it is filled with engaging, distinctive characters. I was amazed to find myself on page 500-something, absorbed and engaged in the story. Silva does a reasonably good job writing women, though his forte is men.
I was struck with how this story is an excellent mix of plain old police detective work and subtle ruthless intelligence work. Silva mixes the two very, very well.
I think it is probably about 150 pages too long. What makes it long is Silva's penchant for a great amount of background detail - all interesting, mind you, but nonetheless perhaps not so much is needed to move the story forward. It is also surprisingly "neutral" as to which side holds the cards, brains and skill - with plenty of blunders on both sides.
In the last ½ of the book there is a plenitude of bloody, appalling and mindless killings and murders, as the 2 German spies fight to escape MI-5 and the entire Allied intelligence apparatus bearing down on them after their cover is blown. Once you get over Silva's occasional invented and too-pat circumstantial events that actually help the Brits run down these spies, the story picks up momentum and becomes a page turner. Both sides make countless errors and missteps. Just because you want the Brits to win out, does not imbue them with infallibility.
The book's major flaw, I think, is the somewhat pedestrian and not-very-creative finale or ultimate resolution. I would have hoped that the last 125 pages would live up to the first 600 pages in creativity and cleverness, but they did not. While not exactly disappointing, the conclusion left me wanting something a little better. It is for this reason that I do not give this book a 5 rating.
All-in-all, if you like WWII espionage historical fiction, this book is a great read. It's brutal, realistic, and a fun romp in 1944 England and Germany, great for vicarious re-living (or first-living) of that marvelous time in our history. This is a great book to read on a holiday, on an airplane, or when you are free to indulge 2 or 3 days to escape into the greatest era of old-fashioned espionage -- World War II. This is not the economical, terse beauty that Alan Furst might write (see his "Spies of Warsaw"), but nonetheless it is very, very good. I give it a 4+.
Customer Review: The Unlikely Spy
Good, complex, suspense/spy thriller. On par with Day of the Jackal; flipping from the Englsih MI5 bureau to the German Ahwer spy bureau during the planning of the Normandy invasion of the Second World War.
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