The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

´Osla sometimes wondered how many women they were in Britain like her, lying to their families all day, every day, about what they´d done in the war´.

 

It is no secret that I am extremeley slow reader of historical fiction. My criteria makes the choice of books very difficult, as I usually prefer contemporary and very recent history topics, and I always need to do my own research to check throughout the facts and details of the story. Being a historian that spent most of her life dealing with media may be the cause, but all being said, historical fiction is rarely my cup of tea. I do my best though to read at least the books everyone is talking about, at least once in a while.

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn took me two years to finish. I started it shortly after reading and reviewing The Paris Library, as it sounded similar from the point of view of both the timeline, the characters and the topic. The Rose Code is part of a much welcomed trend of putting women on the history map of WWII, as part of the code-breaking efforts that were at least as important as the armed fight.

´War meant change´.

It is a massive book - around 600 pages - and the prose is completed by poetry fragments and various media scraps. The Rose Code is a story of women sorority, with some spy intrigue and a lot of love and heartbreak stories. Osla, Mab and Beth are three ladies who had probably never met unless the war brought them together at Blechey Park, where they were among the first to get involved in the highly secretive efforts aimed at breaking the German communication lines. But there is a traitor among them, and the ingenuity of Beth who figured out the betrayal, but not yet the culprit will be paid with three years of her life, spent in a mental institution. Despite the disagreements and enmities, the three of them will work as a team and, as expected, the good will prevail.

There are several lines of the story: a spy intrigue, lots of love stories, women friendship, men broken by wars - Ist and IInd - tragic destinies during war, royal love - Osla, my favorite character, is the late Prince Philip first girlfriend, whom she will apparently abandon due to her work obligations - among others, Prince Philip was suspect for MI5&the company due to his Nazi part of the family (the relationship story was inspired by life, as before being the prince consort, he was apparently involved with the Canadian Osla Benning, later Lady Henniker-Major). There is also a cryptographic part which was by far my favorite, although it took a very marginal place.

The royal wedding of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip serves as a timeline reference of the story, which goes back and forth during and after the war, crossing various information aimed at building up the many layers of the story. As it usually happens in the case of such ambitious narrative, it is often hard to keep together all the elements of the story therefore the eventual conflicts and tensions are solved in a quasi melodramatic way, as it happens more than once towards the end.

Inspired by real histories and characters, The Rose Code do have some ups and downs, a consequence of the overcharged timeline and narrative, but nevertheless was a well documented eventful book that just opened up my appetite for more historical fiction.

Rating: 3.5 stars