Faber is a spy who has been living under various names in Great Britain since 1937 and who, as the child of military aristocracy, has met Hitler several times, treats his superiors with disdain and is the best agent the Germans have in England. The third and most important thread is Henry Faber - or James Baker - or Heinrich Rudolph Hans von Muller-Guder, born May 26, 1900, in East Prussia. Fred is left filled with pain and hate, now a widower like Percy whose wife died of tuberculosis ten years earlier. But it is at home where, early in the war, she is killed by a German bomb direct hit on their building. What she lacks in culinary skill, though, she makes up with courage as an ambulance driver during nighttime air raids who is known as Fearless Bloggs. When they meet, they “nip home for lunch” at Fred’s flat where his wife Christine serves them her usual badly cooked sausage and chips. The second thread is that of Percival Godliman, an historian, expert in the Middle Ages, recruited, as World War II starts, to lead an anti-spy operation and to work alongside Fred Bloggs, a young Scotland Yard inspector with a cockney accent. Good only for raising sheep, it has a house at one end for the shepherd and a second at the other into which David and Lucy move and where, in several months, they begin to raise their newborn son Jo. To escape the well-meaning but oppressive attention of family and friends, the couple moves to a tiny speck in the North Sea east of Aberdeen, a ten-mile-long sliver of land, one mile wide, called Storm Island.
David loses both legs and falls into a deep, untouchable depression. One story thread is that of the English couple David and Lucy Rose whose 1940 wedding day ends in the tragedy of a car crash. And a key reason for that is Follett’s decision to tell his story from three perspectives. Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well - nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read - that it may well be the perfect thriller.
0 kommentar(er)
