Book Review of Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift

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Infiltrating the Gestapo and fighting famine.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This historical adventure is set in that part of Northern Holland which remained in German hands after the failure of Operation Market Garden to secure a crossing across the Rhine. The circumstances lead intelligence chiefs in London to base their assessment of future Dutch needs on what is happening in the liberated parts of Holland (there’s all sorts of political battles between different Dutch factions who are supplying lots of information about their own position, which seems to be none of London’s business by this stage) whilst the success of the Gestapo and other NAZI security forces in crushing resistance cells is denying London even the most basic information on the state of things in occupied territory. And things in the occupied territory are almost unimaginably bad and getting steadily worse as the NAZIs punish the Dutch population still under their control for the liberation of the rest of the country.

Agent Ludo, who has been through so many sets of false papers that she’s almost forgotten who she really is, has to flee from a failed operation and is immediately tasked with befriending a senior German officer in the hope of gaining the information needed to rescue a senior resistance figure from custody and probable execution, not so much to continue the fight as to use his respected position with former resistance groups in the liberated territories to get across, to those who might actually do something about it, the crucial fact that the entire civil population of the occupied area is on the brink of starvation in a freezing winter without any fuel.

Everything for Agent Ludo goes from bad to worse, as it does for her fiancé who has embarked on a fairly hare-brained rescue mission despite having no clear idea about where Ludo is or what she is doing. This mirrors the general state of things in Northern Holland and anywhere else the collapsing NAZI regime still holds power. In the end, Ludo and her associates gamble and sacrifice everything, including their own lives in some cases, on the faintest chance of getting food to the starving population.

Ludo loses almost every battle she fights, but her victory is that she keeps coming back for another try until the SS and Gestapo begin to scarper or fold into mental breakdown and the RAF starts to airdrop food, unopposed, but also too late for many. This novel is morally uplifting but emotionally unsparing. A male author would have shied away from this, but it needed to be written.

 

Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift is published in the UK on the 12^th of September 2024 by HQ.

Book Review of Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa.

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A magical year and the triumph of innocence over loss.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This novel is set mainly in the Olympic year of 1972 and this is important because whilst America and the Soviet Union saw the Olympics as a platform from which to present their competing visions for the future of the world, Japan saw the Olympics themselves as a model of the world as they might like it to be and approached the games with wholehearted and innocent enthusiasm.

The story is narrated by a young girl, Tomoko, who has lost her beloved father and has gone to stay at her uncle’s house whilst her mother retrains to be able to support them both by herself. It’s an amazing house with a big garden, complete with pet pygmy hippo, “Pochiko” and there’s a whole household of fascinating characters for Tomoko to get to know. But she’s not “living with her uncle” as she expected, because he’s hardly ever home. Indeed, he only seems to reappear when Tomoko’s asthmatic cousin, Mina, has a health crisis requiring hospitalisation. (This happens several times.)

Mina seems very weak and frail, but also proves to have developed both her intelligence and her imagination to an unusual degree and Tomoko quickly comes to admire Mina and then to love her (she has to make a effort to correct someone who assumes they are sisters). Mina collects matchboxes with little original cartoons on them, and writes a little story inspired by the cartoon on each matchbox. This is an interesting discipline, because there’s a limit on the number of characters she can inscribe on a small matchbox!

The members of the household (including Grandma Rosa, who is German) all pursue their own daily routines, not avoiding each other at all, but not necessarily being interested by the same thing until the two girls develop an interest in volleyball when they realise that some of the Japanese men’s Olympic team are by no means bad-looking! They learn the rules and imagine themselves being able to play (the reality differs a little) and the whole household, like the country, becomes interested in the Olympics and especially the volleyball!

Then the Israeli team are taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists and athletes are killed. This is shocking and a huge disappointment to Japanese sports fans in general, and to Grandma Rosa and her family in general, because her sister’s family died in Auschwitz. (This does not imply she was Jewish herself: about six million Jews and Roma died in the Holocaust; the concentration camp system also claimed the lives of another five million or so people selected on non-racial grounds, or who simply got in the way of the SS.)

It is a tragedy and one which wounds Rosa and her family, but the games resume and continue, and the Japanese volleyball team wins the gold and returns as heroes. Not just because they won, but because they adhered to the spirit of the games throughout.

Tomoko’s uncle continues to be an intermittent presence and the girls continue to have adventures, including a meteor-spotting expedition to a reservoir in the mountains: they take Pochiko with them so she can have a nice nocturnal swim in the lake!

Christmas looms and Grandma Rosa takes charge, but there is a forest fire and a tragedy on Christmas day. The moment for Tomoko to go back to live with her mother is also drawing near and, perhaps inspired by the barely perceptible fluttering of an angel, she tracks her uncle’s other address down and, quietly but unmistakably, lets him know that Mina needs and deserves what Tomoko herself cannot have: her father’s presence.

 

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa is published in the UK by Random House on the 15^th of August 2024.