Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal

If I was trying to find a literary illustration for the term ‘curate’s egg’ for someone who’d never heard of the phrase, I could do a lot worse than point them at Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. I’m torn between trying to decide if it is a good book with bad bits or a bad book with good bits.

Before I get into the whys and wherefores of those feelings, a bit about the book. As the title suggests this is set during World War II. Our heroine is Maggie Hope, a Brit by birth and Bostonian by upbringing who is settled in London in 1940 after trying and failing to sell her grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in London. After one of Churchill’s secretaries is killed, Maggie is persuaded, against her better judgement, to take on the job and from her position in the corridors of Downing Street and the bunkers of the Cabinet War Rooms she is drawn into the intrigues of the different factions jockeying for power behind the scenes in Churchill’s first months in office.   

All of this sounds very promising, and there is a lot to like about story. I liked Maggie. She’s clever, pragmatic, and a great portrayal  of a very smart girl in a man’s world where women are still expected to stay home, look pretty, put the dinner on and pop out the next generation of little Empire builders. But Maggie is a mathematician, who’d been about to start her PhD at MIT when she’d had to go to Britain, and the fact that the British establishment can’t seem to see beyond her gender to recognize her talents is something that frustrates the hell out of her, and still resonates for many women today. I also liked the plot for the main part and the pacing – it skips along at a fair clip and it evokes a particular era of Britain under siege. From that perspective, to borrow a phrase from Michael Palin, it’s a bit of a ‘ripping yarn’.

Now to the things that grated on me. This the author’s first book and it shows. There’s too much exposition, there is too much unnecessary description – for example I don’t care that her brown straw hat has a violet ribbon on it and there is a lot of that kind of description that makes no narrative contribution, even to describe the type of person a particular character is by wearing such a hat with such a ribbon. I said it evokes a particular era, but sometimes the characterization is very ‘Brief Encounter’ or Noel Cowardesque where people are having a ‘jolly good time’ when they’re not being scared stiff of invasion. Those are nitpicks I know, but they are the kind of things that are like a minor toothache – once you notice it, you can’t help poking your tongue in that direction and so it was with these niggles.

Outside of the niggles there are a couple of things that really bugged the crap out of me, especially as the author quotes an impressive amount of research resources at the end of the book, but gets a few basic things wrong. One is continually calling MI5, MI-Five – that bugged me because it’s just wrong (and I checked the MI5 website history pages to be sure, so if I can do that, so can the author or her editor, so it’s just lazy!)

The second major gripe I acknowledge is partly because I’m a Scot and Scots object to being called English, or having the whole island called England. The author is American, and continually talks about England and I kept mentally shouting at her and saying that Winston Churchill wasn’t just Prime Minister of England. Living on the other side of the Atlantic now I’m hyper-conscious that many North Americans say England when they either mean Great Britain or the United Kingdom depending on whether you’re also talking about North Ireland. This is a general bugbear of mine but given that there is a Northern Ireland-related subplot in the book, continually talking about England felt just really sloppy and lacking any real understanding of Britain being made up of multiple nations.

So back to my original comment. Mr Churchill’s Secretary is a curate’s egg of a book. It is good in parts, notably the heroine, the plotting, and I really was rooting for the characters. But the bits I had issues with, I really, really had major issues with and, in the end, they detracted a lot from what I enjoyed.

It’s a shame the issues got in the way because this is the first in series of books following the adventures of Maggie Hope and if it hadn’t been for these bugbears, I might have been happy to see what she did next. Alas, as it is, I’ll chalk this one up to experience and put it on the pile to take to the annual city book sale (if we ever get back to having another book sale in a post-Covid world).

Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal was published in 2012 and my copy was published by Bantam Books.

Note to my lovely blog readers:
Hi folks, thanks for following my ramblings. It's been brought to my attention that attempts to post comments are not always successful. Just a note to highlight that replying to the email version of the blog post it doesn't post the comment to the blog, and I also don't see your comment (the joys of technology!). However, if you click on the hyperlinked title of the post in the email, it will take you through to the blog page and you can comment from there if you feel so inclined! I'd love to hear your thoughts. :)