Lying with the Enemy: A Novel - Softcover

Binding, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786708093 ISBN 13: 9780786708093

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2000

Synopsis

"A novel of exceptional style and momentum, sustained at a high emotional pitch, and beautifully constructed." - Alan Furst, New York Times Book Review. At once a thriller and a moral tale, this taut, heart-stopping novel explores the deadly perils of collaboration on quiet, idyllic Guernsey in the Channel Islands, the only British territory to be occupied by German troops in World War II. It is 1943. The tide of the war is beginning to turn decisively and bloodily against Germany, but on Guernsey life proceeds blithely beyond the reach of brutal combat. Nazi officers party with local girls, love affairs blossom, the amateur dramatics society continues to stage theatricals. Then the body of a young woman, her nose and mouth filled with cement, is found dead in a bunker, and Guernsey's long-running comedy of collaborative manners sours into a dark drama of war horrors shared by the islanders and enemy alike." A suspense novel that remains faithful to the conventions of the genre while elevating them.... The atmosphere is more like that of a Graham Greene 'entertainment' than a thriller, and the result is richer, scarier, and more satisfying." - Washington Post Book World; "This is a novel you hate to see end, even when the conclusion is so satisfying." - Chicago Tribune; "As sad as it is gripping.... A candid account of the baseness of human nature during wartime, woven seamlessly into a stirring murder mystery." - Rocky Mountain News.

About this title

Review

In Lying with the Enemy, Tim Binding has written a novel that is part war story, part murder mystery, and wholly compelling. Set on Guernsey during the final years of World War II, the story traces the impact of German occupation in the British Channel Islands on both conquerors and conquered alike. Binding makes it clear that the Nazi presence on Guernsey was a fairly civilized affair from the get-go; aside from an abortive raid shortly after the Germans invaded in 1940, the British surrendered the Channel Islands to the enemy, leaving their residents to forge an uneasy accommodation with their new masters. By 1943, when Binding's novel begins, the Germans have been on Guernsey for three years and an inevitable degree of fraternization has become the norm. This is especially apparent in the complicated relationship between Major Lentsch, his island-born lover, Isobel van Dielen, and her former flame (and Guernsey's current chief constable) Ned Luscombe. When Isobel is murdered early on in the proceedings, it is up to Ned to solve the crime--a task that throws him into a reluctant liaison with his rival. As he and Lentsch join forces, their investigation leads them into the back-street world of twisted passions and unholy alliances among islanders and occupiers alike. Meanwhile, the professional association between a world-weary cop and a Nazi-hating German officer turns gradually into a fast though unlikely friendship. Lying with the Enemy is both fine historical fiction and a remarkably acute study of the troubling choices essentially good people make when trapped in morally ambiguous circumstances. --Sheila Bright

From Kirkus Reviews

A different sort of storyteller, English novelist Binding shifts from the macabre world of hangings in A Perfect Execution (1996) to the furtive hazards of collaboration among Britain's Guernsey Islanders under Nazi occupation. For them, the horrors of war are muted, allowing an intensely personal tale of romance, duty, and murder to emerge. Life on Guernsey is certainly different after the Germans arrive, but for all the added gun emplacements, gangs of gaunt foreign laborers, short food rations, and jackbooted troops, it's still possible for two men to be in love with the same woman. Ned Luscombe loved Isobel first, before the war, and she reciprocated even though the chasm of class yawned wide between them. By the time the highly cultured, sensitive Major Lentsch arrives to command the occupation force, however, the ardor between Ned and Isobel has cooled, and as the new head of the island police force Ned can only look on as she takes up with his boss. But then Isobel is murdered, and the two rivals are required to join forces in a painful investigation. Along the way, they become unlikely yet fast friends, though ongoing events keep them from making much headway: Isobel's father, the architect of the island's metamorphosis into a fortress, disappears; a thriving black market involving soldiers and civilians comes to light; Ned's lover before Isobel, Veronica, having already become the daylight mistress of the island's Gestapo chief, secretly harbors one of the starving laborersa boy with the only direct knowledge about who killed Isobel. Churning just below all this, in the witches' brew that Guernsey has become, is the resentment of loyal British citizens whove been too long repressed, and a plot that will mean death for every islander should it be carried out. Credible and extraordinarily revealing: all that we are as humans, good and bad, finds embodiment on this tiny island in the midst of war. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0786708093
• ISBN 13: 9780786708093
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360