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hawkwing_lbThe eve of New Year's Eve is an odd time, I think. One round of celebrations has run out of fuel and energy: the next hasn't quite started yet. It's oddly quiet, almost restful. The sun shone today. It seems important to note that. The sun shone, and shared the sky with a pale three-quarter moon.
Sometimes I forget how beautiful the world is. Take Thursday morning. The sun rising points east of the Anglican church, leafless branches crowding round the spire against puffy grey clouds underlit with pink and orange. Light - pallid, orange - reflecting from the railway tracks, while down by the harbour the tide murmurs against the rocks: green headland, grey tower, black rocks across the curve of the bay from the harbour with its white lighthouse shaded with the colours of the sun. The sea is gunmetal, and the curlews are calling for rain while a solitary crow caws its way across the blue-white belly of the sky.
Russell Braddon's biography of Nancy Wake (Nancy Wake: SOE's Greatest Heroine) is an artefact of its time. One might guess as much from its title: Britain's Special Operations Executive had many Great Heroines during the Second World War. It would be hard to pick out one single 'Greatest' (although, from what I've read, Nancy Fiocca, née Wake, and Pearl Witherington may come close).
First published in 1956, it appears to be much less a historically accurate biography than it is an entertaining piece of jazzed-up non-fiction. Nancy Wake, an Australian who married French businessman Henri Fiocca before the war, was involved in creating escape lines in Marseilles for downed airmen and others who ran afoul of the Vichy and later Occupation authorities. After it became too dangerous for her to continue, she escaped to Britain, joined SOE, and was parachuted back into France, where she became chef du parachutage and in some sense director of operations for the Maquis d'Auvergne.
(Nancy Wake's own autobiography, Le Gestapo m'appellait la souris blanche, was published more recently in France. There does not appear to be an English translation.)
As a historical document, Nancy Wake is more revealing of the concerns of its author than it is of Nancy Fiocca's. It is not, by any means, what I would call an adequately researched, adequately presented, piece of history, and its author seems to labour under the delusion that his audience is not very intelligent, at all.
On the other hand, as entertainment, it succeeds admirably.
Barb and JC Hendee's Sister of the Dead, however, doesn't much succeed as entertainment at all. Meh. Where's the plot? Where are the characters? Don't tell me they were this cardboard-esque in the two preceding books, were they? Enough with the Dark and Mysterious Past already. I give up. Leesil's the only interesting one of the lot, and I suspect that's because he gets much less screen time than his fellow characters.
I had something else to say, I'm sure, but I've forgotten what it was. Alas.
---
Sleep cycle appears to be provisionally reset. Joy!
Sometimes I forget how beautiful the world is. Take Thursday morning. The sun rising points east of the Anglican church, leafless branches crowding round the spire against puffy grey clouds underlit with pink and orange. Light - pallid, orange - reflecting from the railway tracks, while down by the harbour the tide murmurs against the rocks: green headland, grey tower, black rocks across the curve of the bay from the harbour with its white lighthouse shaded with the colours of the sun. The sea is gunmetal, and the curlews are calling for rain while a solitary crow caws its way across the blue-white belly of the sky.
Russell Braddon's biography of Nancy Wake (Nancy Wake: SOE's Greatest Heroine) is an artefact of its time. One might guess as much from its title: Britain's Special Operations Executive had many Great Heroines during the Second World War. It would be hard to pick out one single 'Greatest' (although, from what I've read, Nancy Fiocca, née Wake, and Pearl Witherington may come close).
First published in 1956, it appears to be much less a historically accurate biography than it is an entertaining piece of jazzed-up non-fiction. Nancy Wake, an Australian who married French businessman Henri Fiocca before the war, was involved in creating escape lines in Marseilles for downed airmen and others who ran afoul of the Vichy and later Occupation authorities. After it became too dangerous for her to continue, she escaped to Britain, joined SOE, and was parachuted back into France, where she became chef du parachutage and in some sense director of operations for the Maquis d'Auvergne.
(Nancy Wake's own autobiography, Le Gestapo m'appellait la souris blanche, was published more recently in France. There does not appear to be an English translation.)
As a historical document, Nancy Wake is more revealing of the concerns of its author than it is of Nancy Fiocca's. It is not, by any means, what I would call an adequately researched, adequately presented, piece of history, and its author seems to labour under the delusion that his audience is not very intelligent, at all.
On the other hand, as entertainment, it succeeds admirably.
Barb and JC Hendee's Sister of the Dead, however, doesn't much succeed as entertainment at all. Meh. Where's the plot? Where are the characters? Don't tell me they were this cardboard-esque in the two preceding books, were they? Enough with the Dark and Mysterious Past already. I give up. Leesil's the only interesting one of the lot, and I suspect that's because he gets much less screen time than his fellow characters.
I had something else to say, I'm sure, but I've forgotten what it was. Alas.
---
Sleep cycle appears to be provisionally reset. Joy!