“A woman is like a tea bag. It’s only when she’s in hot water that you realize how strong she is.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Opening with a punch, this book starts with Sarah crouched in the footwell of a car and her mother slumped over the wheel, a bullet in the back of her head. Orphaned at 15, Sarah’s priority is to escape from the border guards that have just killed her mother and get herself to safety.

Set at the eve of WW2, Sarah and her mother attempt to flee into Switzerland. Already pushed out of their home in Berlin, Jews living in Austria are no longer safe from the wave of National Socialism that has taken over Germany in the preceding years and the spread of its power into neighbouring countries. Sarah has been schooled by her mother in theatrical arts which, coupled with her blond hair, allows her to masquerade as an Aryan and helps her to survive.

Sneaking her way onto a boat bound for Switzerland, she rescues a mysterious gentleman, Herr Haller. Putting at risk her own safety, saves him from trouble with the border guards at the dock through her quick wit and bravery and together they dodge their way back into Germany. A German scientist is threatening to develop a nuclear bomb, which would have catastrophic consequences. Herr Haller convinces Sarah to infiltrate a Nazi school, which is grooming the female monsters of the future, so that she can befriend the scientists daughter and gain access to this lab. Sarah becomes the Orphan Monster Spy.

This is a fast paced book, full of action, but it skilfully roots itself in the horror of what Sarah and her mother have endured during the rise of National Socialism. Sarah, though seemingly unshakeable on the outside, has packed all of her terrible experiences into a box down in her soul, first as a means to keep from being overwhelmed by the weight of it all, and later as a source of power to overcome what gets put in her path. Using Sarah’s gymnastic skills as a metaphor, “commit to the move” is a refrain which comes back again and again, giving the message that you have to do something wholeheartedly and with all your effort to succeed. Timidity will lead to failure. Eloquently written, and with real heart, there was nothing timid about this debut novel. I’m looking forward to sequel.

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

I’ve often thought that I have the attention span of a goldfish but usually, when it comes to books, I stay focused on just the one book. I’ve never been that reader with a stack of books at the side of the bed, dipping in and out of several at a time. I would get confused and usually I am too intrigued by one story to drift off to something else. Unless it’s a poor book, where I then cease to read altogether (and you’ve heard me on that topic before [link to post about not reading anything]). So I found myself in the unusual situation a few months back (all the way back in June, in fact), having just started reading A God In Ruins, where a colleague recommended a good book on something topical at work (the book was Black Swan, about the events which are ruled out as unlikely to happen – if they are considered at all – but which nonetheless happen).

When it turned up from Amazon I immediately started reading that book. It was a bit heavy going so I dipped back into AGIR, but I didn’t have momentum. Still thinking I was interested in the intellectual treatise on the occurrence of unexpected events, I tried to persevere on the train but stumbled and stalled without ever getting to the underbelly of those black swans. 

I kept on packing AGIR in my backpack each day but a newspaper, a freebie magazine or my regular subscription of Psychologies magazine would by turns hold more appeal than the “companion novel” (not a sequel) to Life After Life. I took it everywhere because I was always “reading it” even though the bookmark would lie in the fold of the same page day after day, week after week. I hadn’t stopped, progress was just slow. 

Then along came a book which has changed Life As I Know It (a whole other post on that will surely have to follow this – reading Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than Before was my damascene moment) and I read that book with a single-mindedness I’ve rarely before experienced, and a pen in my hand. There was a window of time after BTB when I picked up AGIR and attacked it with my usual fervour – warm sunshine, a comfortable sun lounger and a hotel pool usually creates the right atmosphere for ardent bookworming – and I got myself to halfway. But on my return home, the arrival of another book ordered from Amazon while I was in the thrall of BTB demoted AGIR to the bottom of the bedside pile once more as I soaked up knowledge on the role of carbohydrates in the modern diet (Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat). 

Not wanting to let another month tick by without getting to the end of AGIR, I made it my sole task to do on my train journeys this week. An hour each way affords an ample reading window, excluding the odd distractions of other passengers and the conductor checking tickets. One morning, after reading a particularly moving account of living with (or rather dying from) a brain tumour, I arrived at the office in a somber mood. The metaphor of bees buzzing in the head making honey that was seeping further into the brain was an image that I couldn’t shake. Was that what my aunt had felt when it took hold in her head? Would you actually notice the point at which you cease to be yourself, more bees and honey than you?

AGIR is the story of a man, Teddy Todd, a son, brother, WW2 bomber pilot, lover, husband, father, grandfather, and his wife, his child and grandchildren. A life lived through peace, war and peace again. Of submerging who you are and letting it (or failing to stop it) creep to the surface. Of being washed along in the tide of war, and life, keeping your head above the water (mostly). Of the impact each of us has on the world and those in it. 

It was never the case that I didn’t enjoy the book and certainly having now finished it I feel the richer for it. But it was never a galloping romp or a high suspense thriller. It was about the extraordinary in the ordinary. Sometimes in life, progress is slow. But don’t ever stop. 

“Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed? Bianca: I think you can in Europe” – 10 Things I Hate About You

It’s exciting to find a writer that you just get along with.  Their prose flows, you quickly engage with their characters, you slip into their imaginary worlds like you are slipping into a warm bath, and you lap up their books one after another. I have read three of Jojo Moyes’ books, becoming gripped by her breakthrough novel Me Before You, which has now been made into a film. It had me gripped from the first scenes in the Buttered Bun. I read Silver Bay in pretty much one sitting. Next it was the turn of The Girl You Left Behind. Having just discarded (permanently – it really was that bad) a book set across two time periods of the Second World War and the present day, I was a little alarmed to note that the next book I selected from my shelf was also similarly contrived. I wonder if both authors attended a creative writing class where the suggested topic was “Echoes from the past”.

I nonetheless ploughed on, confident that Moyes would do a better job than my former colleague-turned-author did with her book. Sophie Lefevre is living in occupied France during the First World War, running a hotel with her sister, both of their husbands fighting at the front. Moyes paints a vivid picture of the village and the hotel, Le Coq Rouge, that in my head I could sit in the bar and watch the comings and goings. Most things are not going well, food is scarce and fear is the only emotion, cold the only sensation.

Then, to Sophie’s disgust, the Kommandant orders the sisters to begin hosting the German troops for their evening meal. The Kommandant soon spots the picture hanging in the hotel and is captivated by the subject, Sophie painted by her husband. Through the voice of Sophie we learn of her first meeting with the enigmatic painter and how he comes to paint her, followed by their blossoming romance. The story of Sophie, the Kommandant and the village unfolds and concludes (I shall not spoil it) then the time shifts to the present day and the home of Liv, where the painting of Sophie now hangs, found in a pavement sale by her husband David. For all of the empathy I had for Sophie, I could find none left for Liv. Widowed and cocooned in the home designed by her deceased husband, Liv is wallowing in her grief.

When family of Sophie discover that Liv now owns the painting, Liv battles to keep it in her possession, learning more about its provenance in the following weeks than she had ever done in all the years that it had hung on her wall. Clinging onto the painting threatens to bankrupt Liv and this is where I lost entirely any respect or empathy with Liv and with the story. Had the plot continued in occupied France, or even been expanded, the book would have been already a winner. Tacking on this flash-forward treatise on recovered war treasures seemed to me overreaching, especially with the twee romance that is interwoven into Liv’s story. So yes there is such a thing as whelmed and if you want to feel it, read this book.