Scan barcode
A review by siria
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville by Clare Mulley
3.0
Christina Granville—the nom de guerre of Krystyna Skarbek, the daughter of a shiftless Polish count and his Jewish heiress wife—was one of the most storied and decorated members of the British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) during the Second World War. As an S.O.E. agent, she carried out a number of daring missions across Europe, most famously the rescue of two British agents in France mere hours before they were scheduled to be executed by the Gestapo. Christina's war was an adventurous one, but her post-war life was bleak: unable to return to her beloved Poland, penniless, discriminated against in the U.K. because of her nationality, ethnicity, and gender, and often it seems unable to get out of her own way. She was ultimately murdered, still only in her mid-40s, by an obsessed co-worker.
Christina's is an interesting life, but not one that I think Clare Mulley fully does justice. There's no getting around the relative lack of sources—Christina doesn't seem to have been given much to writing or to reflection, and many papers about her were accidentally or deliberately destroyed—but even taking that into account I didn't feel as if Mulley ever got a proper handle on her subject. The portrait she provides of Christina is out of focus and sometimes at odds with itself (we're often told she's an introverted loner but often encounter her at parties and celebrations, and she had multiple relationships), and the structure isn't as good as it could be. I'm glad that Christina's story has been told, though, and that Mulley made a diligent attempt to separate fact from myth (it's unlikely, for instance, that Ian Fleming had an affair with her and used her as the model for Vesper Lynd).
Christina's is an interesting life, but not one that I think Clare Mulley fully does justice. There's no getting around the relative lack of sources—Christina doesn't seem to have been given much to writing or to reflection, and many papers about her were accidentally or deliberately destroyed—but even taking that into account I didn't feel as if Mulley ever got a proper handle on her subject. The portrait she provides of Christina is out of focus and sometimes at odds with itself (we're often told she's an introverted loner but often encounter her at parties and celebrations, and she had multiple relationships), and the structure isn't as good as it could be. I'm glad that Christina's story has been told, though, and that Mulley made a diligent attempt to separate fact from myth (it's unlikely, for instance, that Ian Fleming had an affair with her and used her as the model for Vesper Lynd).