Book cover image from Shauna Singh Baldwin (Vintage 2004
)
This novel is much more than a spy thriller. Shauna Singh Baldwin has imagined her way into the mind of
Noor Inayat Khan, who in 1943 volunteered to be dropped into Nazi occupied France as a radio operator for the British
SOE.
Baldwin has created a novel of vast scope and universal themes, opening her lens wide to take in the full picture of war, complete with its sharp dilemmas. Against a background of hard national decisions like what Churchill called "acceptable losses," she shows how war infects the mind, causing ordinary people to betray others and delude themselves in the desperate effort to save their own skin.
Noor, on the other hand, is extraordinarily dispassionate as she works for the cause she has taken up. She assesses the French housewife Renee, who will eventually betray her. She considers, then decides against telling the other woman that her olive skin and "the shape of her nose were Indian and American but not Jewish."
She views this other woman with compassion, knowing that her husband is languishing in a German prison camp while her brother risks the entire family daily for his resistance work. Noor realizes that Renee "probably hadn't travelled much, probably considered Paris the pinnacle of the world" and "seemed...confused between religion and race." Alas, such confusion is by no means extinct today.
In sharp contrast to the strength of Baldwin's protagonist, we are shown the weakness and violence of the flawed Herr Vogel, his eyes "as cold as Vichyssoise." He is incapable of understanding why his alternating attempts to bribe and torture Mlle Khan fail; he persists in thinking that with some combination of food, money, comfort, sex and status, he will be able to prevail on her.
For Vogel, the issue of Nazi immorality does not come into the equation. From him too, we hear cant about the "New World Order," a chilling reminder of how little the world has changed.
Meanwhile, Noor's younger brother Kabir, in his zeal to carry out his traditional role as male head of the family, involves himself in forcing his sister to break with her Jewish lover.
Much later, while under cover in occupied France, Noor comes to the realization of how her mother and siblings have manipulated her, in a misguided attempt to protect her from herself and the war and preserve the family reputation. In an elegiac mood, she wonders if any of her life choices have truly been her own.
In Dachau, Noor finds a fellow SOE operative, Yolande with whom she trained. Far gone from abuse and starvation, the two young women lean on one another and hold hands. Still true to her training, one taps Morse messages into the palm of the other.
Though the outcome of
Noor's SOE work may be known before the reader begins, Baldwin's narrative technique ramps up the suspense. She builds it to a fever pitch as she moves from scenes of Noor in prison to scenes of "Madeleine," (her codename), in occupied France. The dates gallop closer together and build to the capture scene near the end of the book.
Though Baldwin's protagonist is more intelligent and courageous than most, her rendering of Noor Inayat Khan is a finely drawn character whose dilemmas any woman can relate to. What woman has not experienced love and parting, the pain of separation from family through growing individuality, decisions about birth and death?
Noor's younger brother Kabir is seen with slightly less clarity. Obliged at an early age to try to fill the giant gap left by the death of their father, a musician and Sufi philosopher, Kabir uses his traditional right of male power on his sister in the name of protecting her.
Later, Kabir volunteers for the RAF. And from France and then Germany, Noor imagines her brother's bomber flying overhead.
Should she hope he drops a bomb on this camp at Drancy? But what if her lover and his mother are still detained there? And why do not the RAF bomb the rail lines to places like Dachau? Why is this a low priority?
At the end of the war, we see Kabir riding through Germany on his motorcycle, frantically following every lead in an effort to find the sister he loves and hopes desperately to see again.
In the final scene, an aging Kabir has occasion to question the imperious actions of his younger self. At the annual memorial gathering to remember his lost sister, he is made party to a secret from fifty years before. History becomes a little clearer when he sees once more the Tiger Claw necklace once worn by Noor Inayat Khan.
In 2012, in recognition of her service to the nation, a memorial bust was placed in Gordon Square in London.
Noor Inayat Khan was the first Muslim woman war heroine in Britain to be so recognized.
