Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia ReesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is getting quite the checkouts at the library, deservedly so. Rees based her spy novel on the possibilities and silences of her own family history, and takes us back to the beginnings of the Cold War: Germany, 1946.
Edith Graham has been more lucky than plucky in life, but that’s all about to change. As modern world wars chewed up the available able-bodied men, necessity opened opportunities for women to do more. Edith spent the war teaching in Coventry; she applies to go to Germany, to help re-establish schools after the war. Her sneaky cousin recruits her to try to find someone they knew before the war; it turns out he was a member of the Nazi High Command.
She’s led to assume that von Stavenow is to be punished, but she finds out that there’s a competition between the governments of Britain, the USA, and Russia to simply recruit the Nazi top brass and scientists to work for them. The Nazis, of course, would love to be whisked off to new lives and new identities instead of be jailed or suffer alongside their countrymen, starving in the rubble and devastation.
Edith’s friends think that those who risked and lost their lives in the war deserve to see the work of the Nazis buried rather than continuing in other countries; they ask her to work for them as well. They’re also trying to find an internal traitor in the War Office and evidence is disappearing in the postwar “cleanup”. Edith is drawn in because of her idealism and her connections, and it’s her idea to send messages through recipes on postcards, using a popular cookbook as the code. What she’s really trying to figure out, though, is how can people you love and share good times with go home and torture other people?
Rees doesn’t gloss over the privations and atrocities of wartime, nor the dangers of spying. She’s not shy depicting the difference between those who want justice, those who want payback, and those who just want to continue living the high life, either.
The Cold War is the war I grew up with: Britain and the USA against Russia; posturing and propaganda on the surface, proxy wars in Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Like Edith, I’m forced to admit that war continues.
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