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Code Name Verity


 

Lies.  Screams.  Fears.  Tears.

After two years with Code Name Verity, I would give the book a resounding cheer.

 

With “I AM A COWARD”, we burst into the prisoner-narrator’s “confessions”.  I think readers mostly start on the side of the narrator/main character(s) but her self-deprecating remarks make us wonder about this ‘heroine’.  Why is she giving secrets to the enemy in exchange for her clothes?!  Then, her story of sweet best friend Maddie unfolds and we wonder what it has to do with revealing codes, passwords, airfields and such.  When you realise that the prisoner is Queenie is Eva Seiler is Julie, she has grown on you.  Julie is such a colourful character who, in her six weeks of torture, terror and expectation of no improvement to her situation, weaves a story that gets you on her side.

 

This book plays around juxtapositions: truth-pretence, courage-fear, friend-foe, right-wrong.  Perhaps the greatest of the contrasts is Part 1 Verity-Part 2 Kittyhawk.  When we get to Maddie’s account, we realise that Julie’s confessions are “rotten with error” (deliberately) and she has pulled the wool snugly over (head of prison) von Linden’s eyes.  Straightforward, pragmatic, honest Maddie is no less engaging than Julie.  You want to hug her and tell her she’s doing fine when she struggles with her fears and gets jittery about almost everything.

 

I like to imagine that Wein had an Excel spreadsheet with all the connections between/among parts and the truth-lie details all laid out when she crafted the story.

 

I generally do not like war literature but I was glad to have been introduced to this one, with the horrors of war told through the experiences of realistic characters.  One can never do justice to the real suffering that real people went through during the war but a story can make us think more deeply about the lives of locals in occupied France (especially if most of your knowledge is from 'Allo 'Allo!), about the British coming through the Blitz, bombings, blackouts, child evacuation and so on, about German officers in a Gestapo prison who are, at the end of everything, people as well.  

 

War brings forth courage, hope and fortitude, and Code Name Verity builds its story around them while also highlighting friendship and the connections that humans will make with humans.  Von Linden being somewhat fond of Julie is unexpected and yet not impossible.  Maddie deciding she likes Engel (from the German side of things) is also not exactly unthinkable.  There will always be those who do evil, who hate, who act irrationally and unimaginably but there will also be those who sympathise, who see what is right amidst all the wrongs and who rise above their situations to do their best.  If only there were more of them.  

 

What I found most moving was how Julie and Maddie’s friendship endure the horrific time Julie spends in prison and Maddie in fear and tension, how they are still a “sensational team” after Julie dies – working ‘together’ to blow up the prison, how Maddie will move on with her life even though “part of [her] lies buried in lace and roses on a river-bank in France… broken off forever”.

 

Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth Wein

(Hyperion, 2012)


book cover from Amazon.com

 

If anyone studying the book for the O-Level needs some help understanding its structure and background (such as all those books and war references, especially in Julie's section), look here.

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