Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.
When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.
As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?
Happy New Year! I've decided to celebrate a day off in the middle of the week by reading about young female spies getting tortured in World War II. I think I've talked before about the overabundance of WWII kid's fic out there, but Codename Verity is a worthy addition to any collection. My mother, bless her heart, read it before giving it to me with her recommendation, but I wasn't feeling it the last time I picked it up, several months ago. It was one of those things where I'd heard too much about the book, and had gotten the impression that there was some "twist" to it, and I was taking everything with such grains of salt I couldn't concentrate on the story.
Which is: a plane with two travelers is shot and crashes, but not before one passenger parachutes out: Verity, an English (Scottish) spy, meant to join up with the French Resistance on a secret mission, gets discovered not more than a week after she lands, captured and unable to talk her way out of it without the necessary faked papers, which were accidentally switched with that of her pilot and best friend, Maddie Brodatt. The first half of the book is the story of the two girls' (I keep saying girls, even though they're clearly old enough to have excelled at their respective dirty jobs) mutual history to the fatal crash-landing.
This is where I got tripped up: the idea that this Verity character would be writing the truth for the Germans was so implausible, that I was really strung out thinking - was this a lie? Was this? In fact, I was pretty sure throughout most of that first section, that Verity was not Queenie, but Maddie herself, pretending to be the other girl for some unknown reason. Lest you be led astray as I was, let me reassure you: Maddie is Maddie and Verity is Queenie (aka Julie). I was also ticked off by the leniency with which Verity was (apparently) given to write her story: she goes off on a lot of tangents, most of which serve no purpose other than (as we discover later) as coded messages to the Resistance. Given that Verity could not have reasonably expected the papers to make it back to the Resistance (at least, not with any real confidence, especially in the beginning), it seems odd that she would have (and could have) written her papers with two such disparate audiences in mind. I suppose she was hopeful on the off chance they could get smuggled out, but then why did the Germans permit it? Very odd.
Because I didn't see much point in anything Verity wrote, I was therefore less impressed at her repression of more relevant facts relating to the secret mission. Since she clearly had to have known more than just what was in the record, it's hard for me to say that she did a great job not telling any of that. Well, obviously, she was tortured. But they kept her alive for weeks, ostensibly for the purpose of this written record of key information, and they don't even attempt to get the basis for her mission in France? Not that it would have mattered in the long run, since she would have lied about it, but it hurts the story, I think, for the reader not to be convinced along with the Germans, of a cover story. Most of what Verity writes is true, but useless (and the parts that aren't true I found pointless - lies about it being a Beaufort plane, not a Lysander one - eh?). I was expecting relevant lies.
What is impressive is how well Ms. Wein manages to convey the friendship between Maddie and Verity, even though they aren't together for most of the book: they meet, train up in separate locations, then spend a few missions traveling together before their final fateful trek to France, whereupon they are immediately separated. However, they share a boundless love for each other, which comes across clearly in each narration in the book. Maddie's final sacrifice is heart-breaking, and I will confess, I did start crying, though the book continues for so much longer that I was quite dry-eyed by the last page. It is refreshing that this is not just another one of those teen love-triangle books, of which there are far too many (girl falls in love with boy, but they cannot be together due to: a dystopian society/sudden onset lycanthropy/he's actually 300 years older than her and that's super creepy, stop acting like it's not).
I think a reader would benefit from multiple readings: Verity's narration, in particular, contains multitudes, which I could not begin to unpick today. It also contains quite a lot of mechanical talk about airplanes, especially at first. It's like the whale chapters in Moby Dick - you just have to get through them, but lordy are they ever a drag. The author is a pilot herself, and it does show. Stylistically, I think it would also benefit from not underlining certain sentences about the Gestapo headquarters - you'll see what I mean. It does make things jump out at you (as it's intended to), but given that we're treated to a run-down of it all later anyway, I think it would be doing more of a service to readers to make them go back to find it themselves.
I thought it was a good book, a worthwhile book, but the feeling of being manipulated was not worth the pay-off of finding out what Verity was lying about. Perhaps when I'm feeling less raw about it, I'll return to it. Because that's the thing: this book does kick you in the stomach. I'm still reeling from it. It's not a very comfortable read, but I do sort of feel like finding an online discussion of it, sort of like joining a support group: CNV Survivors, we'll get t-shirts made.
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