Reviews

Published two years after Eye of the Needle, one of my favorite books I read last year, The Key to Rebecca is likewise a WWII spy novel, with a German spy trying to evade British spy-catchers. It doesn’t quite capture the same wire-to-wire suspense, starting slowly, with a spy looking for a way to steal documents, and then looking for good documents to steal. The second half picks up a lot in terms of suspense, but a couple other things keep this from being another 5-star banger like Eye of the Needle:

—The British spy-catcher is not very likeable, or very good at his job. He never really does anything clever, and the book is basically a series of his failures until he finally catches a whole series of lucky breaks in the third act. Despite the fact that Follett spends a lot of time describing how kind and good-hearted he is, I never liked him.

—The German spies are a little too relatable. This is not entirely a bad thing. I love a bad guy with a relatable motive. The German spy is half-Egyptian (the novel takes place in Cairo). He uses a number of other Egyptian assets. They all side with the Germans because the British have been oppressing Egypt for decades and they hate the British more than they hate Nazis. That’s extremely understandable, to the point where i kind of didn’t want the British to win. This gray-area “who’s the bad guy?” effect is unintentional, I believe. Follett describes the German officer as vile, and the British one as noble. It’s nowhere near as clear cut as Eye of the Needle, and so nowhere near as compelling.

—sex is frequently used as a moral judgment. One of the German assets, a female cha-cha dancer, likes MFF threesomes. Her queerness is seen as a violation of the societal code of conduct. This was set in WWII, so I suppose that’s historically accurate, but a lot of it feels geared toward titillating a 1980s audience, with all of the casual homophobia that implies. A lot of the sex in the book (there’s a lot of sex), feels like it’s passing judgments on its characters. The good British spy-catcher has good moral sex, while the bad German spies have kinky immoral sex (that turns out to not be very kinky at all, not just by today’s standards but even to the third character in the threesome). The German spy kidnapping a woman is also treated as the same level of badness as the cha-cha dancer wanting a female lover.

—The book has a lot to say about women and sexuality, but none of it is terribly deep or insightful. Perhaps it was progressive for its day. It is, unsurprisingly, quite outdated now.

jack_the_sipper's review against another edition

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adventurous lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

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