The Tapestry of Time
I’m a sucker for a good secret history. There are, of course, a lot of bad ones out there, but I’m happy to report that the latest novel from Kate Heartfield is a fine example of the genre.
The book is set mainly in occupied France during WWII, which gives plenty of opportunity to explore women’s history. To start with, Paris before the war was pretty much World Lesbian Central. Heartfield declines the opportunity to feature real members of that community who were involved in the Resistance, such as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, but a lesbian relationship is very much central to the plot. To my delight, Heartfield manages to make the romance fiction tropes work in the book, rather than shoehorn the characters into them.
Thus we have our main character, the bookish Kit Sharp, who is an art historian working at the Louvre, and Max Yardley, her headstrong and adventure-loving childhood friend. Kit’s father is also an historian, and has an obsession with the Bayeaux Tapestry. Max’s father is an MP, and therefore deeply involved in the war effort. Both have major roles to play in the story.
Next up in our tour of early-mid 20th Century women’s history we have the Special Operations Executive. This was a special forces unit that worked closely with the Resistance. Many of its members were women who were parachuted into occupied France to work as spies and radio operators. Kit’s youngest sister, Ivy, forever trying to prove herself in a family where she will always be the baby, ends up joining the SOE.
Ivy doesn’t just get to punch Nazis, she kills them.
Kit has two other sisters. One, Rose, is heavily into mathematics and music. She ends up working at Bletchley Park, another way in which women contributed to the war effort. From the book’s point of view, she gives out heroines access to information that would normally be Top Secret.
Finally we have Helen, who so desperately wants to fit into her society’s view of a proper woman (wife and mother) that I kept wanting to slap her. She ends up working with the Land Army (which you may be familiar with from Tiffani Angus’s Threading the Labyrinth), until she gets pregnant by her soldier boyfriend.
The other main character in the story is the Bayeaux Tapestry (famously not a tapestry but an embroidery). Given that it depicts a successful invasion of England, the Nazis were keen to use it as a propaganda tool. Himmler was particularly fascinated by it, and shoehorned the story of William the Conqueror into his Aryan ideology. It is a bit of a weird thing to have done, given that the people whom William defeated were the Germanic descendants of the Angles, Saxons, etc.. But William was a Norman, and therefore of Norse descent. And in any case, Nazis have never been big on actual facts.
The missing piece is the fantasy element. Himmler, of course, was deep into occultism. Heartfield gives us our fantasy element in part through the mysterious character of Aelfgyva whose presence in the Tapestry is a subject of much debate
The Tapestry of Time is a book that is dripping with excellent historical research, and a deep respect for the roles played by women in WWII. Of course I loved it. I hope you will to.
Title: The Tapestry of Time
By: Kate Heartfield
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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