Getting selected for any of the SOE activities was notoriously
difficult and the training grueling.
There are three agents who are followed closely in the novel, but the
focus is mostly on Rose a most unlikely candidate. Her two main desirable characteristics are
her indomitable desire to see the Nazis defeated and perhaps, more mundane but equally important, her
fluency in French.
Rose was working in a top-secret basement bunker as a typist
when she caught the attention of Winston Churchill. He took a fancy to her and
pushed for her to complete the grueling, arduous training. She does finish, barely and earns
the codename
Dragonfly.
She and her two compatriots Muriel and Felix parachute into
France where they are met by the French Resistance. One of the French fighters is Lazare Aron, a
Jewish man, who escaped being shipped off by the Nazis with complicity of the
French police. His parents were not so lucky.
In keeping with good novel action, Rose and Lazare fall in
love although there is much standing in their way of happiness. Capture and torture is often a byproduct of
being a spy and that happens in this case.
Many individuals in the novel are killed or wounded over the course of
time until D-day and liberation.
Rose is tested in many ways but perhaps the most intense is
one that will put her personal feelings to the test against justifying the
faith that the Prime Minister and the British High Command have exhibited in
her.
A wonderful read made more compelling to those who did not live
in those years but interested not so much in the damage and destruction of WWII
and its aftermath but in the very human people who made things happen – for good
and for bad.
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