Faber uncovers the truth behind Operation Fortitude – fake tanks, plywood airplanes, sheet metal barracks, cardboard battleships floating on oil drums, and a barrage of phony radio messages – and surmises correctly that Calais is a feint and the real invasion will happen at Normandy. This is the first time Godliman and Bloggs not only cross paths with him, tailing a turned spy who gives him the message, but also immediately lose track of him, so good is he. The story picks up when Faber is given a mission to find out the truth behind Operation Fortitude, the buildup of General Patton’s First US Army Group (FUSAG) for the Allied invasion of Europe through Calais instead of Normandy.
All of this is at a pace that hardly feels like a thriller, let alone one set in the middle of war but the pace is deliberate, contrasting with the high-speed action in the last few chapters. Lucy and her husband have an accident immediately following their wedding and the husband loses his legs, which necessitates their moving to an isolated island off the coast of Scotland for recuperation. Godliman, a historian of note, is recruited into the Double Cross Committee for his habit of meticulous research and the ability to find obscure but accurate details in the unlikeliest of places. Faber, the professional spy, murders his landlady when she discovers his real identity and disguises the murder to look like a tryst gone sour. The book starts sedately, with Follett taking up the first 7 chapters merely to establish the capabilities of the principal players. And the love interest, Lucy, is getting married to a fighter pilot. The spy catchers from MI5, Godliman and Bloggs, are just meeting each other after being recruited into the Double Cross Committee.
His position gives him access to troop train movements). All of it set in the time and place when spies and spy catchers were considered by the public to be the norm – Wartime London.įollett breaks the fourth wall and introduces the main characters directly with lines like “Faber and Godliman – two-thirds of a triangle that would one day be completed by the principal of a ceremony proceeding at this moment in a small country church.” When we first meet the German spy Heinrich Mueller-Güder at the beginning of the war, he is masquerading as the Englishman Henry Faber and working as a lowly railway clerk in London (not without purpose, though. And because every thriller essentially needs a love interest, we have the love interest too – but not in the format expected by the readers.
The protagonist is usually a step behind, with a brainy sidekick to help even the odds. Its antagonist is smart, focused, skilled and determined. Initially launched as Storm Island after the name of the story’s climax location, The Eye of the Needle is the quintessential Spy Thriller, checking in on all the requisites for a potboiler.
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