ROME- Caroline Moorhouse's recent non-fiction A Train in Winter and Irene Nemirovsky's novel The Wine of Solitude indicate a renewed interest in wartime France.

Particularly when a divide existed between the Vichy zone and that occupied by the Nazis. A sub-genre of the war-time France novels are those about British women parachuted in to help the Resistance, such as Charlotte Grey by Sebastian Faulks.

In The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Simon Mawer shows the enduring interest of these themes by recreating the queasy atmosphere in both zones of France in his novel about Marian, of English-French parentage, who is flown into France to aid the Resistance but also to convince an important nuclear physicist, who is useful for development of an atomic bomb, to leave Paris and also arrange his flight to England. She is chosen for this task partly because the scientist was half in love with her when she was a teenager in Geneva.

Rome-resident Mawer, whose The Glass Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is a teacher of biology which shows in his skilled handling of the novel's scientific sections.

The plot is well contrived even if it follows a familiar pattern and one can see a film in the offing. There is more than the expected suspense, double crosses, chases and escapes. There is also a credible Marian , initially naïve, curious and impulsive but later alert and tough. She immerses herself in her spy role, in changing names and identities, in living a lie and grapples with the dilemmas this entails.

The fact that she is a lapsed Catholic helps her feel in a quandary when she has sexual relations with both a fellow spy and the atomic scientist. More profoundly, she has lost her faith in God but has "come to believe in Satan and the only way to combat Satan is to be as ruthless as he is." She believes "only in the power of evil and the fragile battles of men and women against it."

Mawer conveys her Special Operations Executive training in England and Scotland for her mission as well as her activities in Vichy France and Paris in unobtrusive but evocative prose able to convey fear but also hope. It is an accomplished work which makes one curious about what Mawer could do with a novel set in wartime Italy divided between Mussolini's last-ditch Republic of Salò and the Partisans.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

By Simon Mawer

Little, Brown Book Group

301pages

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