Look, it read a lot better than that descriptor. It was, in fact, a cracking thriller; one of those old fashioned WWII novels that worked as a page turner and skilfully traversed the line between entertainment and the boundary of good taste (one does not tend to link entertainment and the Shoah). Somehow, Gross managed to do both – be informative and entertaining, all the while being respectful of the historic significance of his setting.
More’s the same with The Saboteur, his follow-up which shifts the narrative from a concentration camp to German-occupied Norway. His central protagonists and titular heroes need to sabotage the Germans’ efforts to develop ‘heavy water’ in the lead up to developing atomic weapons; it requires a one pronged effort to set off explosives in a dam; the other being a =n effort to sink a ship shuffling barrels of the stuff away from the Norwegian mainland.
To Gross’s credit, he manages to retell this true story as another old-fashioned spy tale, cut from the John Le Carre cloth. His two ‘set pieces’ serve as structural narrative bookends, and allows much room for character development and what one might only assume is a certain degree of creative embellishment and license to keep things at a clip.
It does feel padded out in places, in that the characters spend a lot of time being stuck in the snow or traversing the many mountainsides on skis. Gross also has a tendency to have his characters re-tell exciting moments, or perhaps narratively gripping encounters as reflections in the third person – we are told these stories after they happen rather than witness them as unfolding scenes in the story’s arc.
Having said that, it is a page turner, and shows an author with a solid understanding of content, history and a reverence for historic fact. While it lacks the emotional wallop of The One Man, it’s still a solid page turner, set in a heretofore neglected theatre of that particular war.
Available now
$29.99, trade paperback
Pan Macmillan