This could have been a much better account of what is a real story, were it not for the frequent exceedingly self-absorbed religious & philosophical musings of the heroine Noor Khan, in times of difficulty during her emprisonment in particular. She was the daughter of a Sufi teacher & veena musician and an American mother, who was raised in France except for a couple of years in India, and whose family fled to England, just prior to the outbreak of WW2. She had met & fallen in love with a Jewish musician Armand Rivkin at the Sorbonne who was rejected by her family, and aborted their unborn child(unbeknownst to her with the machinations of her mother, brother, and sister). Her father returns to India and dies there a couple of years later, Noor, her mother, her younger brother Kabir,& sister Zaina staying in England, where Noor is recruited to the SOE which masterminded & ran spies against the Nazis on the Continent. She is trained as a wireless operator & dropped into Nazi-occupied France where she joins an underground network, and hopes to meet up with Armand who is arrested and send to the concentration camp at Drancy outside Paris, to await deportation to an extermination camp. The network is gradually eroded by Nazi arrests due to the treachery of collaborationists, and Noor stays in France beyond her original 3 week assignment, as she is the sole remaining radio operator in N.France, and suspects correctly that her flight out has been sabotaged. She never sees Armand again, though she manages to send him a locket of a tiger claw which had been in her family for generations(wrapped in a paper declaring her love 8 years after their separation) and through which he gets the courage to survive his deportation & emprisonment. She is betrayed to the Nazis by a fascist woman, a sister of one of her network members, and is jailed in Nazi headquarters in Paris, and then Forzheim, Germany where she will spend nearly a year, before deportation to & execution in Dachau extermination camp. The book chapters alternate between her spying activities in France & her state of mind in prison(which I found too self-absorbed, dominated by religious meanderings, and boring). After the war, her brother Kabir looks for her in Germany, but cannot find her, though he meets up with Armand and they meet annually at her memorial service.
I am not sure what to say about this novel. It is the fictionalized account of Noor Khan, an Indian/American/British woman who was a spy for the French Resistance during WWII. It was also a kind of love story, although the love story seemed be more of a sub-plot. The main story seemed to be about a woman who finds the strength to be the kind of woman that she has to be, if that makes any sense. So here are the blah parts of the novel: 1) a bit slow to get into 2) the main character could have been developed a bit more, I think the author was a bit shy of developing a fully rounded character, mainly because she was a real person, 3) it seemed to drag a bit and took me a bit to become invested in the story.The good: 1) it was like Romeo and Juliet, in that you know the ending, but you still hope that it will turn out differently. I have to admit, that at the end I did go "NOOOOOOO" as if I could really change history, 2) the bouncing around in time was a bit weird, but it added a meatiness to the story that was good, 3) Loved the character of Armand and Kabir and would love to read their story, although their story was Noor's story so....Overall, a good read if you like historical fiction, although don't expect it to be a spy mystery, because it's not.Cheers
What do You think about The Tiger Claw (2005)?
It’s been two weeks since I finished The Tiger Claw and I sat down to update and couldn’t at all remember what I had read since Galveston, which can’t be a good sign (whether of my memory or of the texts, I can’t be sure).I took The Tiger Claw on a week’s holiday with my family, which always means ample time to read. Even with all kinds of opportunity, I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading. I suppose there’s only one way to put it: The Tiger Claw was boring. And it has no right to be! It’s set during World War Two (always a scintillating period) and features Noor Khan - an Indian-British-French resistance fighter. There should be intrigue! action! fast-paced… anything! Alas, even with occasional moments of action the heavy-handed imagery and aspiring-epic scenery descriptions makes it feels like nothing happens for four hundred pages. I do admit I found the last hundred or so to be engaging, but really, not enough of a payoff to make up for the sluggish first 4/5ths.I’m glad I’ve written this, as maybe it will mean I’ll remember having read this book. Maybe.
—Erin
I read this novel a few years ago, but I still think about it and recommend it to people. My description wouldn't give the plot justice, as there is a lot going on all the time. The novel is based on the true story of a woman named Noor who was a spy for the Allies during WWII. The story shifts from her time in a Nazi prison where she is being held as a traitor to the events in her past leading up to her decision to become a spy and her eventual capture. Noor's fate remains completely unknown to readers until the very last chapters of the novel and the author keeps you guessing right up to the end.
—Jennifer
I liked this book more than Shauna Singh Baldwin's more touted debut novel (What the Body Remembers). My word for this book is "satisfying" - the love story is unabashedly sentimental with a setting that was both familiar (set during WWII) and fresh (a female British secret service agent). The only significant critique I have of Mrs. Baldwin's writing is that I find the cultural context/background, in this case the protagonist is a Sufi Muslim, is a bit heavy handed (to be clear the same is very informative). That said, I still had misty eyes at the end and a compulsion to look up Noor Inayat Khan on Wikipedia once I was done!
—Violet+Audrey
