Reilly keeps the
action moving so fast that maybe his committed readers will swallow it all. It
starts off by being quite fun, but, for me at least, the utter nonsense becomes
a little hard to take. However, if you can suspend disbelief it makes for a
lively romp. (review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Matthew Reilly is best known as a writer of high-octane thrillers and while Mr Einstein’s Secretary doesn’t really fit into that category, there is enough quick-fire action and outrageous coincidence to make it obvious where the author’s roots lie.
The novel opens in America in 1948 with Hanna Fischer observing her own funeral, poorly attended with Albert Einstein one of only four mourners. We are left wondering if Hanna is watching from some higher existence, or what. But eventually of course, all will be revealed.
There are a number of jumps in time as we go back over Hanna’s life, starting with her German childhood where she and her parents were the Einsteins’ neighbours, and, coincidentally and usefully, the child Hanna was a physics prodigy. And we get snippets from various interrogations Hanna underwent at the hands of the American police in the 1930s, the Gestapo in 1942 and the Red Army in 1945 as slowly her story unfolds. It is difficult to give any sense of the book without some spoilers, but I’m not sure that it really matters.
Hanna has a big role in many of the major events of the first half of the 20th Century. She finds herself among the New York gangs in the Prohibition era, later working, as the title suggests, as secretary to Einstein as well as to a well-connected businessman in the years leading up to the stock market crash. And then she is recruited as a spy to return to Germany.
She doesn’t just do low-level spying. Hanna finds herself working as secretary to Albert Speer, and later to the repulsive Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, only to eventually escape from Berlin at the end of the war by the skin of her teeth. Along the way she fends off kidnappers, attends the 1936 Berlin Olympics, hobnobs with some of the greatest scientific minds of the age and sees the worst of the Nazi atrocities. And while all this is going on, she has to deal with her evil identical twin, Norma, who disappears for long parts of the story, only to keep on reappearing at crucial and disastrous moments.
If all this sounds implausible – well, it is. Reilly keeps the action moving so fast that maybe his committed readers will swallow it all. It starts off by being quite fun, but, for me at least, the utter nonsense becomes a little hard to take. However, if you can suspend disbelief it makes for a lively romp. - Margaret von Klemperer
Matthew Reilly’s Mr Einstein’s Secretary is published by Orion ISBN-13: 9781398721272
Posts
