Berlin Duet by S. W. Perry
This is a historical thriller built on old-fashioned virtues of solid storytelling and three-dimensional characters. It alternates seamlessly between different time periods – pre-war Britain, Hollywood, Vienna and Weimar Berlin; the war years; the harsh, contested aftermath of the allies’ victory in devastated Berlin; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. All are presented in a vividly authentic way.
The framing device is provided by Harry Taverner, an elderly British spook, who is picked up by the police at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, distressed and distracted, on the night in 1989 when the Wall fell. His daughter, Elly, also in the intelligence service is given a courtesy call by the authorities to collect him. However, Harry knows his memory is fading and, like the Ancient Mariner, he fixes Elly through the night with his mesmerising account of his memories working with Anna Cantrell, a young Anglo-American photographer, during the 30s and 40s. Through a long, momentous night, he gradually reveals his and Anna’s story in the hotel where they had danced together over fifty years earlier.
Anna is our protagonist, an amalgam of Lee Miller and a female Le Carre operative, with a difficult private life that drives her behaviour throughout the book. She is the product of a dysfunctional relationship between her colourful mother – as comfortable in the exotic 1930s’ cabaret clubs as Sally Bowles – and her bisexual film director father. His indiscretions tear him out of Anna’s life but his love and example give her a lifelong passion for the power of the visual image.
As a young woman in pre-war Berlin Anna is swept along by the artistic freedom of the time. She has a front row seat at the rise of the Nazi Party but, unfortunately, this is also bound up with the rise of her charismatic, handsome husband, Ivo, who thrives under national socialism. Too late she is trapped in a marriage with a ruthlessly ambitious man with two children to protect and no obvious way out. Nevertheless, horrified by the Nazi regime she forges her own defiant stand when Harry targets her as a potential source of information on the inside because of Ivo’s growing connections with Hitler’s new ruling elite. Harry and she progress from their espionage relationship to a more romantic one but that is only the start of their story.
The real strength of this historical thriller lies in the way that the different milieu and moments in history are conveyed. There is depth and nuance to, for example, Perry’s evocation of the lives of German women and children in Berlin during the immediate post war period. We witness events from Anna’s point of view; and as a Jewish woman who fought against the Nazi regime, we appreciate her horror at life for the defeated in Berlin alongside a sense that this was all of their own making.
There is an epic sweep to Perry’s storytelling that critics liken to Boyd’s and Faulks’ novels – and I think those are fair comparisons. In the second half of the story, the action is propelled, like that of many other stories after the war, by Anna’s attempts to reunite with her children.
There is also a final twist when Harry concludes his long night of memories that the reader can see coming miles away. That’s no problem, though, as it is wholly appropriate and secondary to the thrilling exploration of Anna’s experiences during these tumultuous years. And what makes that exploration even more satisfying is the way that Anna’s story allows a fully developed insight into the experiences of the many people she encounters – noble, self-serving, evil, desperate and ordinary - caught up in the century’s tumult.