Jackdaws ~ Ken Follett

Jackdaws by Ken Follett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jackdaws!

I have read very few novels about female espionage so this was something new for me to read.

Also, I adore Ken Follett's writing so I gladly gave this book a go. (It helps that I got it for cheap at a used book store.)

As usual, Follett's writing sucked me right in. I read the book in 2 1/2 days and probably could have read it in one had I not been so busy.

We're introduced to Flick, our protagonist who is a strong spirited petite British woman, working as an operative in France during WWII. She has connections to resistance fighters all over France which becomes obvious to Dieter Franke, a German intelligence office who makes it his mission to capture her.

The book is set over a series of nine days, I believe, so everything happens very quickly as it paves the way for D-day. All the characters are both hilarious and endearing simultaneously. As Flick struggles to pull together a team of women for her mission into the heart of France, we meet these characters who bring their own joie de vivre that excels in this novel. There's a transvestite, a murderess, an aristocrat who is a crack shot, etc. There is no end to the strange yet lovable players in this story.

I'm also fairly certain that many of the details Follett supplied are historically accurate, so you're learning something about WWII espionage while enjoying a good read.

So for all my sparkling praise of this novel, why did I only give it 3 stars?

First off, the sex scenes. Yes, as always, Follett manages to slip some in and they unfortunately come off as a very awkward and misplaced. The intimate scenes in The Pillars of the Earth were far better written and much more plausible. In Jackdaws there were this horribly penned moments between Flick and her newly introduced squeeze Paul that are just so...cringe inducing.

Second, the dialogue was often inappropriate for the time era. Since Follett tried to keep historically accurate with all his details, why were the character's line so strangely misplaced in that time era? He also throws around the word "fuck" a few times and very needlessly. Instead of helping the plot or character development, it just cheapened what he was doing.

Thirdly, I felt that even though I did enjoy the plot, everything tied up far too neatly. There were many close calls for Flick, lots of red shirts being randomly tortured and killed by Nazis, but yet everything ends up working out perfectly at the end of the novel. Do I want there to be a sad ending? Not necessarily, but it didn't seem logical that Flick and her lover Paul would both survive those arduous nine days. Perhaps Follett needs to learn how to pull a George Martin: his novels may be more memorable if he kills off some lead characters.

I did really really enjoy this book, but the strange sex scenes put me off enough to give it a lower rating. I will definitely continue to read my way through Follett's novels--hopefully they aren't all so awkward.

3/5 stars.



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More on LOVE!

My coworker just blithely informed me that she is "in love" with the newest man in her life. Let me break the scenario down for you... She's a thick, white girl--ahem, gurrlllll *snap snap snap*--and I have never met anyone like her before...she chases the brothers, shaking her booty at reggae and Trini (Trinidadian) clubs and bars, wanders around the floor humming Usher or Akon, and talks in strange slang that I find fascinating and confusing. During Caribbana she stripped down to a bikini top and bottom, along with a giant and feathery head piece, and pranced down Yonge to steel drums and much foofah. "H" is energetic and happy, always flitting from one thing to another, telling me wild and crazy stories about her nights out on the town or a flirtatious moment with a bartender or waiter.

Anyway, her last relationship lasted a couple months and was more on and off than my bedroom light switch. She vacillated between being angry at the man for being emotionally unavailable, and then reached heady peaks of pleasure and happiness. They just, like, got each other, know what I mean?

But after the relationship crashed and burned, here she is, once again throwing herself whole-heartedly, with reckless abandonment, into another man, already convinced after three or four weeks that they are in love and he can do no wrong. He's a Jamaican who will be unable to stay in Canada permanently, and God help me, I find myself skeptical (at best) about his motives. But she's in loooveeeee and it's the real thing!

What's the point of this rambling?

How does this woman recover so quickly from each relationship and bounce on with such vivacity to the next and the next and the next? I spend hours sobbing and watching P.S.: I Love You and The Notebook, journalling dark thoughts and ideas into my tear stained diary, listening to Damien Rice and John Mayer (doo dee doo I'm perfectly lonely, cos I don't belong to anyone and nobody belongs to me dum dee dum), and either binge eating or starving. There is no half hearted loving for me and the drop to rock bottom shatters me every time (Oh yeah, John Mayer has a plaintive lyric for that as well: how come the only way to know how high you get me is to see how far I fall?)

Even as I write this and think deeply about the human heart and our capacity to love, I find myself conflicted internally. For "H" I feel happy, jealous, doubtful, cautious, afraid, pleased, disbelieving... As history has proven over and over...all will go superbly well for maybe a few months, and inevitably things will slowly take their wear and tear, and ultimately fall apart.

I ask, how does one pick themselves back up after another broken relationship, and cheerfully start all over again with optimism and hope that this could be The One? How do you just move on from being so close to another human--physically and emotionally intimate in every manner? When it seems as though the entire world is rushing past you in a frenzy of love and energy, when you feel frozen in one spot, unable to move forward and desperately wanting to move backward and just get another, just one more chance to fix things...how do you step out from that place and join the living again? And more importantly--how do you embrace the next relationship knowing that it might be your destruction...again?

We do what humans do best: rebuild. We start from the base up with ourselves, attempting to clear out the rubble of the past. We find the tenacity to start all over because it's what people do. History screams out that truth. London was raided and rebuilt seventy-one times in less than a year during the Battle of Britain, the English spurred on by multitudes of inspirational speeches from Churchill (We shall fight on the seas and oceans...we shall fight on the beaches...we shall never surrender...), so we clear away the ruins like the English did time and time again. We try to restore our faith and hope, and sometimes when we're so hurt, we have to dig deep for the person we were before the storm. We soldier on, we press forward, we accept the grief and dwell on Tennyson's wise words: better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

What alternative do we have? Close ourselves off from the beauty of loving someone? Hide from relationships, fear of pain pushing us away from people? Bury your heart deep down so it can never be broken? Do we attempt to maintain space, between our hearts and people, in order to save ourselves from falling into love, and often past it into the abyss of brokenness?

There are two things that I cannot escape:

Love can be painful. People are going to hurt me, and I'm going to hurt someone. We're not perfect, we never will be, and we have accept that our relationships will be imperfect to some extent. The loving husband and wife who never raise their voices on tv are not realistic. We disagree, we fight, we argue, we debate--differing opinions, varied emotions is what makes people so interesting and unique. I look at marriages around me that are twenty odd years strong, and I still see flaws and imperfections, but I also see a deep love and commitment that has lasted through time and through the petty fights and squabbles. Love isn't always glorious, poetry inspiring, and wonderful. Love is what sees you to the end.

"Love" isn't always love. We can be infatuated with someone and barely know them! We can think that the dreamy guy who can play the guitar and sing is meant for us, OMG, but how do you know for sure? What am I basing my feelings of "love" on? I've learned the hard way how hurtful it can be to awaken feelings of "love" that were not real and were not lasting. Guard your heart and don't give it away freely to anyone who has a nice smile and a witty overture.

"H" interrupts my reverie. "We need a WalMart greeter here," she says, referring to the constant stream of visitors that somehow manage to get completely turned around and require redirection. They come to my desk looking for so-and-so on cardiology and insistently reiterate, "It's on the FOURTH floor! This IS the fourth floor! We took the elevators to the FOURTH floor."

Yes, yes you did...just, the wrong fourth floor. You got off on the right floor...in the wrong building, and it feels like there's some significance to that predicament, as if we charge into things with the best intentions, but sometimes the timing is off or it's not the right person, and we're as turned around and bewildered as the purple-haired elderly woman who struggles to understand how there is five different wings within one building. She pushes her walker slowly down the hall, determined to make it to her friend/lover/family, and we forge ahead needing to believe that it will all work out and we will make it somehow, the pieces glued together by faith or desperation to be loved.

I hope "H" has a long lasting and successful relationship...I hope that all those feelings she is experiencing, and that she joyfully shared with me, stay. I'm glad she still has the courage to give herself over and surrender to joy and pain of love. I pray you do too.

A Little Bit Of This...

and a little bit of that.

The this and that is my recent foray into the historical military movies.

I've been watching through Band Of Brothers for the first time, and so far am simultaneously moved, saddened, sickened, and almost...belittled by what I have seen.

Based on true events that occurred to America's Easy Company, 101st Airbourne, through their experiences during their drops in WWII.

The soundtrack is easily the most moving piece of music I have heard lately.

But I was talking to a friend earlier today, and he expressed disinterest and distaste for this genre of movies. Well, that's fine because we're all allowed our likes and dislikes, but I just think this --

I don't watch this stuff to laugh or be horrified at the gruesome occurrences. I watch so I won't forget the sacrifices that thousands of soldiers made for us...whether American, Canadian, or British. Their bravery puts me to shame, and I often wonder what I would do in situations like those.

Not only that, just living through the experiences of warfare was not the only difficult thing for the soldiers. They eventually had to return to a society of people who could not understand what they had lived through, the things they had done, and the things they had seen.

I never want to forget what people have done for freedom, I never want to minimize the sacrifices those soldiers made, I never want to push the unpleasantness to the far recesses of my mind.

If people can sit down and watch a slasher or horror movie without batting an eye, they should consider sitting down and watching a thought-provoking movie that has historical significance and that we can all learn from.

Take a minute today to reflect on the sacrifices people have made for you.