The cover of Ken Follett's newest is stamped with a swastika and crimson parachutes that at first I took for drops of blood. It was probably the fifteenth release I picked up in a Christmas-crazed Border's Books. Since most of the others on the "new release" table were self-help bibles and presidential histories, I decided to go with Jackdaws (Dutton) and hope for the best.
After reading the first chapter, I put everything else on hold.
Jackdaws is absolutely impossible to put down — though Follett's tale is fictitious, the circumstances are historically accurate and completely addictive.
The book centers on Flick Clairet, an English undercover agent working with the French Resistance in the weeks before the D-Day invasion.
After a failed Resistance attack on the cathedral at Reims — a base crucial to German communication lines — Flick dreams up a way to destroy the heavily-guarded telephone network hidden in its basement.
The English Special Operations Executive approves her plan, but Flick must form her all-woman team in days: of the women she finds, none are professionals and all join the team with secrets to hide.
The story of their mission is divided into page-turning sections following either Flick or Dieter Franck, the pitiless German major bent on arresting and interrogating her. Luck turns to Flick and then to Franck and then back again. Her team slowly falls apart, leaving her with fewer and fewer outlets as Franck follows her unrelentingly.
So here's the appraisal. While it won't take the place of war classics like All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms, Jackdaws is a definite page-turner — I really felt an adrenaline rush from my recliner.
But that's all this book has to offer. Only Franck and Flick become truly three-dimensional characters; the rest are predictably flat. And though Follett does write war horrors (i.e. Nazi torture chambers) well enough to give me a few nightmares, there isn't a flood of symbolism and underlying meaning.
So read Jackdaws for the thriller it is, but don't expect to be bowled over by poetic passages and thought-provoking ideas. All that gives way to entertainment.
And acknowledging that Jackdaws is an at-the-edge-of-your-seat read, Follett writes in clear, easy-to-read prose.
Though it's an historically accurate war story, there's rarely puzzling jargon and nothing goes unexplained (since I definitely wasn't familiar with a Lee-Enfield No.4 Mark 1 rifle and couldn't have explained the difference between Lysanders and Hudsons).
Follett obviously did some research, and you will walk away knowing a lot more about World War II.
My favorite part? Jackdaws is dedicated to the 50 women who went into occupied France as undercover agents during World War II — but who, like Flick's team, weren't recognized with Military Crosses.
