Turning the heat on the Cold War

Simon Mawer's feeling for time and place is impressively sharp. Photo / Concetta Mawer

When we last saw Marian Sutro, in Simon Mawer's The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (2012), she was being arrested by the Gestapo in Occupied France, where she'd been an agent of the Special Operations Executive. Now, in Tightrope, we rejoin her on her return to Britain in 1945. Still in her early 20s, she finds it understandably difficult to adjust to the post-war world.

On the one hand, she's still haunted by her experiences of torture, and of Ravensbruck concentration camp. On the other, back home being fussed over by parents seems soul-crushingly dull and overwhelmingly strange, as if normal British life were just her latest cover story. Nor is there much call for the talents she has to offer: among them, the ability to kill people, and to strip and assemble a Sten gun blindfolded.

With one of her wartime lovers dead and the other making a go of it with his wife, Marian drifts into marriage with Alan Walcott, an ex-pilot, whose initial kindliness curdles into an infuriatingly plodding decency. And so, when her former SOE handler asks her to dust off her old spying skills for the Cold War, she reacts with a mixture of elation and relief. (Incidentally, although it's customary to claim that sequels "stand alone", this one works far better if you read The Girl Who Fell From The Sky first.)

In the opening sections of the book, Mawer captures Marian's disorientation with affecting conviction. His feeling for time and place remains impressively sharp, from rationing-era London to the "strange, febrile vitality" of post-war Paris. Marian remains a compelling heroine, whose many contradictions are all believable - even if, to the long list of men who are smitten by her, we can confidently add the name of Simon Mawer.

Along the way, we learn plenty of interesting stuff about the development of atomic weapons, and why so many of the scientists involved believed that the West should share its nuclear knowledge with the Soviets.

Yet none of this is quite enough to disguise the fact that the second half covers some pretty well-trodden fictional ground. If nobody had written a Cold War thriller before, the last 200 pages might well seem like a startlingly original combination of narrative twists, moral ambiguity and an all-pervading atmosphere of mistrust. As things stand, the nagging sense of familiarity - complete with a mole at MI6 and several parallels between spying and adultery - becomes ever harder to ignore.

Oddly, Mawer seems aware of the problem. The book is framed by a present-day interview between the elderly Marian and the somewhat intermittent narrator Sam, who knew (and, of course, loved) her as a young man and has been asked by the British authorities to find out what she remembers. "The whole damn story," he writes early on - and in a possibly unwise hostage to fortune - "is riddled with cliches."

None the less, not only does this awareness fail to spur him on to depart much from the usual blueprint, but the same taste for chestnuts is regularly found in the wider points that the novel draws from all of its thoroughly imagined detail. The creation of the hydrogen bomb is compared to opening Pandora's box.

The post-war world, we're told, has lost the reassuring certainties of the war itself and instead consists of "shades of grey". Sam likens his attempts to build up a full picture of Marian to putting together the pieces of a jigsaw - before deciding that this was a woman who "battled with her demons".

Odder still for a well-regarded writer, Mawer tends to produce these images with a proud writerly flourish, as if their revelatory freshness is likely to bowl us over.

After a notably varied career, with fictional subjects ranging from the history of genetics (

Mendel's Dwarf

, 1997) to religious conflicts in the 16th-century Mediterranean (

The Bitter Cross

, 1992), Mawer has certainly earned the right to try something more straightforwardly commercial, by respecting the conventions of the traditional thriller.

The trouble with Tightrope is that, while the result is often undeniably entertaining, this respect seems to grow increasingly slavish the longer the book goes on.

Tightrope
by Simon Mawer
(Little Brown $37.99)

- Canvas, Telegraph