One Woman’s War
One Woman’s War: A Novel of the Real Miss Moneypenny
By: Christine Wells
[Fulfilled ‘A book with a title that has a possessive noun’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
“Deceiving the Nazis was one thing, deceiving her husband was quite another.”
I was intrigued by the subtitle indicating this being the story of the ‘real’ Miss Moneypenny, the character in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.
It was just an okay book.
I think the ‘true story’ aspect of the story is what saved it. Without it, it would have been a pretty boring and anti-climactic book because it doesn’t necessarily focus on any one plot/conflict as much as just the lives of the two women written about: Paddy and Friedl.
For a WWII novel, it seems to diverge quite a bit in the feel of the story compared to most of the other WWII books I’ve read.
When you read a WWII novel you usually confront the atrocities of the war, the starvation, the rations, the hardship, the violence, the loss of loved ones, the evil of the enemy. They’re usually visceral and/or heartbreaking. You usually read about the acts of courage and bravery in the face of danger and at great personal cost.
This book felt pretty removed from the war. It felt almost luxurious and high class. Thinking back, I’m not sure there was ever really a death talked about except a passing mention in the Epilogue.
Christine Wells wrote this book to follow the lives of two women who worked in/with British Intelligence: Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, who is the likely inspiration for Miss Moneypenny, and Friedl Stottinger, an Austrian double agent.
I’m assuming most people who are big Ian Fleming fans already know that during WWII he served in the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Division in London where he helped with covert spy operations. I wasn’t aware of that so it was interesting to see what he did for a living before he wrote the James Bond novels. It gives a lot more context and curiosity to what potentially inspired those Bond stories.
Paddy worked as his secretary and was privy to a lot of the spy operations and intel. She even participated in one of Fleming’s major operations called Operation Mincemeat. In this operation they took a dead civilian body, dressed him as a Naval officer, planted false military information on him, and left him off the coast of Spain to be discovered and hopefully get that information passed along as legitimate to deceive the Germans as to where their troops were planning to attack around the Sicily area.
I had heard of this operation and I can’t for the life of me figure out where— was it another historical fiction book? Did I watch the movie (2021)? I don’t know. So it wasn’t as fantastical or shocking to me since I already knew about it, but for those who haven’t I can see how that would be a really interesting story to learn about.
I feel like the book summary is a bit misleading when it says,
“Soon, the lives of these two extraordinarily brave women will collide, as each travels down a road of deception and danger leading to one of the greatest battles of World War II.”
Their lives don’t really collide until the very end and though collide is literally accurate, it feels very brief and largely inconsequential. Only Friedl experiences a bit of danger (toward the end of the book) but again, it’s mostly just an interrogation that doesn’t last very long. They both are entangled in deception and that’s where I think the bulk of the storyline rests.
‘Leading to one of the greatest battles’ seems to imply that we are going to encounter this great battle and read about it happening. Nope. They ‘launch’ their operation and then they go about their daily lives until they get word about how it all ended up.
Most of the book feels like a recounting of a night at a club after another. Lots of elite parties. They do their office jobs and then they go out with their friends to eat and dance and they may be ‘gathering intel’ but it’s not high stakes in London. Sure, there are air raids, but you don’t ever really feel like they are in danger. If there is rationing happening and food scarcity, you would never know it. If there is a shortage of proper clothing and household necessities, they never encountered it.
If that’s really what life was like for them, then that’s how the author has to write it. I mean I’m glad not everyone was in dire straits during the war and I do want the the truth about what it was like for them, but in terms of a good, compelling, engaging story that grabs your attention and keeps you reading and invested, I don’t think it really did that. Sure they made some ‘tough’ choices but it never really felt that tough.
I would read it more like a biography than historical fiction. It was just…. lightweight… for a WWII novel.
In the huge swath of WWII literature, I’m not sure this makes much of a mark other than a James Bond-fan read to get some background on Ian Fleming’s life. Granted, I’m not even that and though I’ve seen some of the Bond movies, I could not tell you anything about Miss Moneypenny. So maybe I shouldn’t have been intrigued by this book after all— what am I doing here? Haha!
There were also a couple other things that seemed played up. Considering these were two of the major events in the book, it seems fine to critique them.
One of Friedl’s tensest scenes involves a negative of an important photograph. She goes to great lengths to obtain it and secrete it away as an ‘insurance policy’ of sorts? There is a lot of hubbub around it. But it’s not even clear that this negative poses any real sort of risk to the mission. It was supposed to be destroyed as precautionary but just because it wasn’t destroyed didn’t mean anything. Who even knew about it? For one of the main ‘big’ things in the storyline, it felt pretty minor.
The other major encounters is when Paddy, who is recently pregnant, is hit over the head with a cosh. When she comes to she is very alarmed about the baby and they talk about taking her to the hospital for a few days and how she got a fever— which I guess could be a result of a concussion— but then Paddy’s thought is “by some miracle they had kept the baby safe” and I was like… you got hit in the head and you fell down, I don’t think the baby was ever in any real danger? It just felt like an exaggeration in an effort to create some danger or tension but felt fairly minor.
I also want to mention a British term that I hadn’t come across yet:
Friends often called each other ‘old thing’ which just made me laugh a little because it just doesn’t sound like an endearing term even though it was supposed to be. Do people still use this term in Britain?
Recommendation
Unless you’re really interested in Ian Fleming or Operation Mincemeat, I’m not sure this is the WWII book you want to read.
Or I guess if most WWII novels are too intense for you and you’d like the WWII setting without all the violence, danger, and heartbreak, this would be a good option.
But otherwise I think this book is pretty anticlimactic and boring. It is interesting to read the true story aspect of it, but that might be all it has going for it.
It wasn’t terrible to read while I was reading it, but by the time I finished it I was like- that’s it? Not much really happened I guess…
[Content Advisory: No swearing; a little sexual activity but nothing super graphic]
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