A Heroine of the Resistance
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Novels about real-life secret agents often arrive in waves, motivated by the declassification of files or some other trigger that sets writers’ minds racing and publishers’ wallets opening. It’s unusual for two inspired by the same person to be released within a week of each other, but that’s the case this month with Liberation by Imogen Kealey and Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon.
Their subject is Nancy Wake, who was born in New Zealand but grew up in Australia before fleeing at 16. She eventually made a new life in France, first as a freelance journalist, then as a socialite wife, and finally as a courageous agent with a price of five million francs put on her head by the Gestapo.
After the fall of France she helped Allied servicemen and refugees to escape to Spain with false papers. But with the Nazis closing in on her in 1943 she had to escape by the same route, made her way to England, joined the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted back into France to assist the Resistance in the lead-up to D-Day. She lived and fought alongside the Maquis in the Auvergne and earned their respect, bicycling hundreds of miles to reach a radio operator to restore contact with London.
Her extraordinary story has been told before, but Kealey and Lawhon use the freedom of fiction to breathe new life into it. Liberation has been adapted from a screenplay due to be filmed with Anne Hathaway; Imogen Kealey is the pseudonym of the screenwriter Darby Kealey and novelist Imogen Robertson. Lawhon has bestsellers exploring the Hindenburg disaster and the mystery of Anastasia Romanov to her credit.
There are, naturally, huge areas of overlap between the two books. Liberation focuses on Wake’s struggles to carry out her mission in the Auvergne amid the warring egos of the Resistance men, while Code Name Hélène interweaves this with episodes from her prewar career in journalism, her glamorous affair with and marriage to the industrialist Henri Fiocca, and her work with the Resistance’s escape routes in Marseilles and its surroundings.
Wake was given the sobriquet “The White Mouse” by the Gestapo, and both books dramatise the hunt for her through fictional figures. In Liberation this is Major Markus Böhm, a Cambridge-educated officer determined to stamp out the Resistance. Lawhon creates two nemeses for Wake: Marceline, a French collaborator, and Obersturmführer Wolff, first seen wielding a whip against an elderly Jewish woman in a Vienna square. It’s virtually impossible to portray Nazi officers without summoning up leather-coated Herr Flick caricatures, but these are suitably chilling and distinct antagonists.
Which to read? Code Name Hélène is the richer of the two, and the more thoroughly researched; the chapters devoted to Fiocca’s courtship of “Noncee” and their luxurious lifestyle in peacetime Marseilles give the opening third of the book a slower pace, but subsequent events gain power from the juxtaposition.
Liberation is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a touch more Hollywood. In one scene Wake enters a café to meet a contact, despite being warned that the Nazi-collaborating Milice have sealed the town; she coolly introduces herself as the woman pictured in the Wanted poster above the counter before shooting two Milice men dead and killing another with his knife. Another exploit features her disguising herself as a prostitute to infiltrate Gestapo headquarters and then poisoning the officers’ wine. Wake did kill Nazis, but neither of these incidents took place, and these depictions in Liberation of her defiance and courage occasionally feel overly insistent — several scenes ending with her being cheered.
Lawhon’s novel has more than its share of action, but since it is largely told in the first person we see the danger from Wake’s perspective and are rarely instructed what to make of her. These are exciting and well-written accounts of wartime valour, and their protagonist’s qualities shine through. As the authors’ note to Liberation observes, Nancy Wake’s life was too full to be contained by any single novel, and these are two fine additions to the literature on this extraordinary woman.
First published in The Times, March 16 2020