May review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal, 2012. [War/Military Fiction category]
For May, I chose War/Military Fiction as my category, something I do not read often--but I suppose that is the point of Eclectic Reader, is it not?--and what better way to fulfill this category than to chose something that encompasses so many things I love? Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal is chock full of feminist sass (Maggie Hope), peppered with historical fun facts (the P.M.'s cat named Nelson), and seams together seemingly disparate storylines (there are spoilers in the seeming), among other elements. I do believe I'll have to mention some spoilery things in this post, so beware!
First of all, this book has a pretty excellent first line: "Half an hour before Diana Snyder died, she tidied up her desk in the typists' office of the Cabinet War Rooms" (p3). I am a sucker for dramatic irony, though it gives me no end of anxiety. To introduce a book not only with a death, but a death that is almost unrelated to anything you've read about the book--on the back, in a summary, etc--is a pretty ballsy move. With the infamous carelessness of writers like George R.R. Martin these days, death in literature has become something of a conundrum. The old assumption "Oh, he's the main character, he can't die," no longer stands as tall as it once did. Now, beginning a book that I had chosen for a war/military category, I had expected to be confronted with death, but what I did not expect was that it would follow a minor, albeit causative, character home from work and once she thought she narrowly avoided assault, only then would it strike. I believe it set me up to expect the unexpected, in a way, for the rest of the book, although there were in fact things I did not see coming. Diana Snyder gets a prologue and some scattered mentionings throughout the rest of the tale, but really she is only there to allow a vacancy at Number 10 Downing Street for our protagonist, Maggie Hope, to fill. It becomes more apparent that this vacancy is more intentional and relevant than simply an author's machinistic choice, but more on that later.
So, brief summary: Maggie Hope, an American who has come to London to sell her grandmother's house but ends up living there and working in London as the Blitz looms ever nearer, finds herself the newest typist at Number 10, Downing Street, or the center of Churchill's operation. She is incredibly smart, gave up a PhD program at MIT--hard to come by for a girl in 1940--to come to London, but even with her skills the establishment laughs in her face when she applies for anything higher up or more stimulating than a typist job. Which she doesn't really apply for, a friend corrals her and essentially makes her take it, after listening to a poignant rant about how "a mouth breather who probably still has to sound words out and count on his fingers" gets the job she has been turned down for job without question just because he has a penis (p19, getting into the good stuff right away). The stage has been set for Maggie to become an integral part of the War Effort, eventually typing for Mr. Churchill himself (hence the title). She even tells him off for yelling at her at one point, which is excellent to watch play out, especially when the condescending, demeaning word he is searching for to describe her in his head is finally "girl" (p68). Which brings me to one of the major themes I enjoyed in this book: the strong, girl power, "anything you can do" vibe that resonates just under Maggie's skin and lashes out in the above-mentioned situations. Most of the women in this story are allowed strength and depth of character and space to grow, most notably Maggie and the woman who is ostensibly her opposite Claire, who really represents the other half of sentiments/actions on the war. Although some of her scenes were difficult to read, especially when she first meets the founder of The Saturday Club, a group of Nazi sympathizers who think that "The Jew is our enemy--our common enemy, Germany's and ours. The Jew is our absolute enemy who will shrink at nothing" (p49), somehow the reader still got a sense that Claire was strong in her own way, using everything she had to fight for what she believed in, although I do believe that could've been shown more than it was exhaustingly explicated. She holds her own in the same way that Maggie does, even subtly telling off a man who is her elder and considerably more powerful than she, simply because he underestimates her:
I fucking loved this scene, because Claire was very collected and gets to slap Pierce in the face with her a) book learning b) translation skills and c) freedom of speech. Granted, a second later she retreats to the squealing "But why?" character that she must play in order to fleece Pierce, but it cannot really be helped. The scene where these two halves of the female activist come together in the end--and they do come together, and their meeting is unlike anything to be expected, in my opinion--is equally as much a test of their character and resolve as when they are confronted with the men who underestimate them.
In terms of the category, I definitely think I chose a quirky book. It is true that this book is about war, but not in the sense that one normally thinks about a war novel. This is a story of the behind-the-scenes, the construction that props up Winston Churchill's famous words, the undercurrent of micromanagement and symbolism and fatigue that makes up any campaign, but especially a military one. I loved this story because it is not one we often hear. I have read very little about secretarial or typist positions through the years, possibly in an attempt to distance myself from any lingering stereotypes or assumptions, but Mr. Churchill's Secretary allowed me a way in that was easy and full of intrigue that kept the pages turning in spite of any exasperation I might feel on the state of women's issues in the milieu of the story. In fact, there is a historical note at the end of the text that reiterates that this text is not a history, nor is it meant to be, and details the author's motivations and discussions with real-life typists--ones who never had time for such "intrigues or romance," as one described them. Sure it is a romanticization of events, molded to fit the guise of a mystery story, but there is that kernel of Truth with a capital T, an inkling of History that is why I love to read things like this. It is why I wanted to write historical fiction and be a History major for a long time: I love finding the story behind the facts. The face behind the nameplate, the feelings behind the events. Particularly for the faces that are not often noticed, like a new typist in the War Rooms. (This feeling will carry on to the next book I have chosen for the challenge...) This novel gave me a picture of not only the Winston Churchill as seen by those who took down his words and observed his process, his fabrication, but a picture of those women who are so often brushed over as a conduit, simply the means to the end that is Churchill's amazing speeches and thousands of statements and letters and memos.
Perhaps a tad bit ironically, to end I would like to discuss the epigraphs in the book. Shown in the image below, there is a quote from Winston Churchill about wartime, and a passage from Christopher Morley's novel Kitty Foyle, essentially highlighting the nondescript and thankless position of typists. Morley's novel is about a working class girl in the 1930s coming of age, finding her place in a new world after moving from small-fry Philadelphia to NYC.
I think the addition of these two quotes is particularly important to set the tone of this book--ok, duh that's what epigraphs are, but I feel like to some extent epigraphs give something away in their lines. These lines, however, ask questions of the reader to keep in the back of their minds as they progress, questions of truth and agency and war and what it is to be a woman, and it is these questions that make Mr. Churchill's Secretary all that it is.
