Elizabeth Wein: Code Name Verity

            Code Name Verity covers a two month stretch during which two best friends were shot down in France during World War Two. The entire first half of the novel consists of an account of their friendship, written by Julie, aka Verity, under torture and the threat of execution from her Nazi captors. The second half tells the story of Maddie’s efforts, with the French resistance, to find and rescue Julie and the other prisoners held with her. 

            There are a couple of wonderful storytelling devices here. First, during Julie’s entire account, we’re led to believe that she is in fact Maddie. Julie tells their story from Maddie’s point of view and carries Maddie’s identification materials. This confusion of identity continues all the way up to the end of Julie’s account, when she finally writes out her full name and then writes “I have told the truth” over and over.

            It’s not until Maddie gets hold of this written account and reads it that we know for sure that Julie has not told the truth, or not any truth that would matter to the Nazis—no useful military secrets, nothing that would help them at all. She told the truth about their friendship, that’s all.

            The two are both stuck in France, Julie imprisoned, Maddie in hiding, at first in a barn, and then with a local family. It’s tremendously eerie to read the second half knowing what the first half contains, when Maddie does not. We know, for instance, that Julie is imprisoned just down the road, in town. One of Julie’s guards is the son of the same family Maddie stays with. They are very nearby but neither knows for sure until the crisis at the end, when a botched rescue attempt ends with Julie asking Maddie to kill her before the guards can torture her to death.

            Julie’s written account contains so many lies, untruths, and half truths, it’s impossible for me to imagine anyone not immediately rereading this book after finishing it the first time. Just as one example, Julie portrays her German translator, Anna Engel, as a sadistic, petty monster. It’s only when Maddie actually meets Engel that we discover that this was a lie designed to protect the kind Engel from her Nazi boss. Everything Julie writes is part of her self-described Scheherezade performance, trying to keep her story going to put off her inevitable execution.

            I love an unreliable narrator, but this adds another level. We have a reader, Maddie, who knows exactly how unreliable the narrator is, and why, and can unpack this for us. Maddie’s story seems to be entirely honest, but she reveals that she has in fact hidden things even from her superior. She tells him that she had to kill Julie, though. She also tells Julie’s brother, a fellow pilot. And they tell Julie’s mother, who, like the brother, completely forgives Maddie and tells her it was the right thing to do.

            Structurally, I can’t help thinking that the author set up the entire novel to lead to that point, where a pilot in way over her head gets put in the position of having to take her best friend’s life. The situation is even set up in a story that Julie recounts in her writing, of a great-aunt whose husband had terrible incurable cancer. The great-aunt killed her husband while they were out hunting, and it was judged a shooting accident. It’s presented as a mercy killing and read that way even by Maddie, who finds the story long after she had shot her friend.

            Since the days when I studied Battlestar Galactica (the reboot, of course) as the ultimate in storytelling, I’ve been fascinated by good people put into impossible situations. This is the ultimate example. Would you kill your best friend to save her from a fate worse than death? The Nazis had lined up three last prisoners, Julie and two men. They shot the two men in the groin and then through both elbows. Julie was next.

            I could not believe that Julie was not going to make it out of this book, especially since Maddie had actually found her. The narrative tension at this point was so extreme, I kept looking for ways for the death not to have happened. Her sweater was red, after all, mentioned several times. Maybe she just fell back when the shots were fired. I actually keep going back to the text, trying to figure out a way Julie could have escaped. Everything in the book built toward that moment, two friends separated for the entire length of the book then finally reunited so that one could save the other. Saving just didn’t mean what I thought it would mean.

            Of course, this is Maddie telling the story. Maybe Maddie lied and Julie got away, right? I’m still trying to save Julie. In fact, I was waiting the entire second half of the book for Maddie’s web of lies to be unraveled the way Julie’s lies were. I still half feel like there must be a way to take Maddie’s story apart and find out that Julie was saved. I suppose that’s the danger of writing such good unreliable narrators. When the author says, “Okay, but *now* I’m telling the truth,” I don’t believe her.

            Julie pretended to give in and roll over for the Nazis. She lied to them so consistently and carefully that her lies held together. The other prisoners despised her as a collaborator, that’s how good her act was. The lie was only revealed when the author revealed it. Now I’m imagining a nested set of stories, where each person knows the truth about the previous person’s lies and reveals them. Quite Chaucerian! I’m thinking of the Pardoner, who forgets that he just told everyone how his shtick works and then tries to use it on them, to general derision.

            It’s dangerous to trick your readers because of this absolutely false hope we can get that maybe the worst thing didn’t happen. We didn’t see the body, did we? The great-aunt in Julie’s story, the one who shot her husband when he was dying of cancer, actually lives in the town, right near where Maddie shot Julie, and ends up taking care of Maddie and later burying Julie and another girl in her own garden. The great-aunt tells Maddie: “We share a terrible burden, cherie. We are alike.” At this point, we as readers understand that they have both done the same thing, but Maddie doesn’t know yet. This is such a twisty, complicated, frontwards and backwards book.

            The blurb on the front cover says: “A fiendishly plotted mind game of a novel,” and I have to agree. The most complicated part comes when Maddie deciphers the code that Julie and Anna Engel have worked into Julie’s “confession,” a set of directions that points Maddie to exactly the information she needs to break into and destroy the building where she and the other prisoners were being held. So Maddie and the Resistance get their revenge and rescue all the rest of the prisoners, and destroy Nazi headquarters, all because Julie managed to build the truth into her lies. Maddie decides that’s what the story of the great-aunt meant—Julie intended for her to blow up the building with Julie still in it—and maybe that’s the case. But I might still comb the second half of the book looking for any scrap of hope that Julie somehow got out of France alive. Look what Maddie writes herself, before she reads Julie’s account, before she really knows what’s going on in the prison: “I don’t believe she’s dead, I don’t believe any of their bluff and lies and bullying threats. I don’t believe she’s dead and I WON’T believe she’s dead until I hear the shots MYSELF and see her fall.”