Readings: MOTHER, DAUGHTER, TRAITOR, SPY, by Susan Elia MacNeal
What would you do to save your world?
Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, by Susan Elia MacNeal, October, 2022, Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House
At one point, more than 200 pages into MOTHER DAUGHTER TRAITOR SPY, one horrific charismatic leader is rallying a crowd of bigots with, “This country’s been stolen — and what are we going to do about it?”
It’s not a gathering of deplorables cheering on the 2016-model fascist, you know, the one who gained popularity and stole a presidency and three supreme court seats by roiling hate and fear and calling on hostile foreign powers to assist him? No, it’s 1940. and the character of Samuel Carson is based on a real person, Robert Noble, avid and public anti-Semite, worshiper of Hitler and deathcamps.
Wouldn’t it be nice if reading this novel was an experience of “I didn’t know that happened in this country to that degree during World War 2” as opposed to “I didn’t know that happened then and can’t believe it’s happening again now.”
Susan Elia MacNeal, author of the 10 novels in the Maggie Hope Series — and I’ve read and loved every one, as have my three sisters — has written a stand alone novel featuring mother and daughter, Violet and Veronica Grace, who go undercover, spying on American Nazi & fascist groups in 1940s California. They, too, are based on real people and the novel is inspired by actual events.
I’ve struggled with how to best write about this novel. On the one hand, it is a tale of terrifying circumstances, made all the more so because they are modeled on actual real life people and their stories. On the other hand, Susan Elia MacNeal really knows how to plot, build characters, create tension, and structure a novel so it is compelling, making the reader want to consume it all in one sitting.
And if it happened before, it could happen — and seemingly is happening — again.
MOTHER DAUGHTER TRAITOR SPY may be about the 1940s, but it’s not only relevant today, it’s the kind of information and story that it is essential be told. The awakening and shock that Violet and Veronica experience when they infiltrate the ugly organizations on which they are informing is not unlike the horrors brought on by living through the last few years; witnessing the racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, on and on and on, encouraged and espoused by the maga-ts and gop-zis, and the willingness of millions of people in this country — even some we knew and thought to be decent human beings — to join in the hatred and mass sociopathy.
It’s a scary world we’re living in, and Susan Elia MacNeal manages to address that, to navigate it in a way that doesn’t back away from its abhorrent, repugnant details, but also doesn’t hector or lecture.
Both Violet and Veronica are at life-crossroads. Violet’s husband, a military man, has died, and Veronica has been made persona non grata in her field of journalism after an ill-advised love affair with a casanova-reporter whose wife has connections throughout the industry. Many of the “evil” characters claim to have become “awakened” to hate at just such points in their lives — many haters in the real world also want to justify their hatred by citing life crises or perceived persecution by the groups they despise, always looking for someone to blame for their unhappiness or failures. It is especially artful for Susan Elia MacNeal to have placed the heroines in situations like that, where they — were they lesser people — could have turned to hate. But good, decent people don’t.
As with all of the Maggie Hope series, this novel is well researched and manages to evoke the period without pedantic travelogue. And, too, Susan Elia MacNeal never fails to deliver prose and plot that speed along, characters that are developed and full of recognizable and relatable human qualities.
It is sad that the issues addressed in this novel are hurtling disastrously toward us again, but encouraging that our artists are finding ways to bring the danger to light. And encouraging that there are and always have been courageous, decent people who resist and fight against the evil and hate.
And, bottom line, aside from the social relevance, Susan Elia MacNeal is a damn good writer. And even better, a damn good human being. There cannot be too many of either and so I intend to celebrate and support and follow and read all of them.