Code Name Verity – By Singing Light

It has been seven years to the day since I first posted about Code Name Verity here.

There are a few stories in the world that bleed backward and forward from their point of origin in your life, so that it almost seems like they have been there forever.

There are a few stories that reach out and grab you from the very first page and keep you in their power well after the cover has been closed.

There are a very few stories that seem so tangible and real that it is still hard to believe that the characters didn’t actually exist, that Maddie never flew a Lysander and Julie never bluffed her way desparately through an impossible situation.

(Fly the plane, Maddie.)

It’s probably obvious that, for me, Code Name Verity is all of those. I’m not a reader who collects second copies of books, but at one point I had three copies of this one, and two of its companion book, Rose Under Fire. It is so intensely personally important that at any given moment I just find myself thinking of a moment, a quote, a character. Still, even after seven years. It happened to me last night when I was driving home in fog.

But it’s not just me. I don’t have any empirical data, but I’ve seen it cited over and over as an influence on other YA writers and readers. It was a book centered on two girls and their friendship at a time when that largely felt rare and impossible. Right now in this year of 2019 we’re having a mini explosion of YA that’s at least billed as feminist, but in 2012, the attention was largely on male authors who perhaps wrote a female main character on their third or fourth book. (But she didn’t have any female friends, of course.)

I am not trying to make a sweeping argument that there were no feminist YA books before CNV, because almost every time we make that kind of “first of its kind” argument, we erase some bit of our history. However, it does feel true to me that in the moment it was published, a book that was so intensely focused on female friendship felt a bit like a thunderbolt and a wake-up call combined.

(We make a sensational team.)

And because it was set in the middle of WWII, a realm that has often been centered on male stories and experiences, CNV was also a way to remind us that women had a place in the middle of the war. As pilots, as spies, as wireless operators, as code-breakers. As Polish Girl Scouts and Russian Night Witches and Jewish resistance fighters. And also as German drivers and camp guards and filmmakers. It doesn’t attempt to tell all those stories, but it resists that idea of the lone woman in a male world that sometimes crops up in historical fiction. It gives a sense that women were everywhere and that all their stories are important, even the ones that aren’t as thrilling.

But most of all, Code Name Verity gave us Maddie and Julie. And I don’t know exactly what to say here except that I love them both so fiercely that there aren’t exactly words for it. Maddie-and-Julie, Julie-and-Maddie. The sensational team. The story is supposed to be about the planes, but it’s always about them. Every twist and every allusion. Flying in silver moonlight, in a plane that can’t be landed. This is a story they’re writing to each other and also creating between themselves; at the same time, it is somehow a story they are creating with us reading. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

p. 10-11 This is the point where, the first time I read, I started wondering if Verity could actually be Maddie, because it’s so much from Maddie’s pov. I kept wondering, kept hoping it was an elaborate double-fake, for ages.

p.36 The descrptions of Maddie’s flights are so beautiful. I wish I had proper coherent thoughts about their place in the narrative, which feels hugely important, but partly I think it’s Julie reminding herself of what she’s doing this for: “her island home that she’d seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight.”

p. 63 “Must have no sense of direction whatsoever” DANG IT, EWEIN.

Somehow on my first read, I had the impression that Julie/Queenie/Verity was quite tall. Apparently not so!

p. 69 “or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year you were 13″ That is embarrassingly familiar, except Nancy Blackett instead of David Balfour.

p. 79 Ah, the first of the underlinings.

p. 83 “It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.” This kind of sums up both Maddie & Julie for me.

p. 85 Second Peter Pan reference. I cannot read that book the same way ever again.

p. 114 ACK. This part is just so awful. ACK.

p. 121 “Maddie said a silent, secret thank-you to Adolf Hitler for giving her this utterly daft chameleon for a friend, and chummed Queenie out to the airfield, following Dympna.” I don’t know exactly why, but I love that line.

I don’t know about other people, but I personally find the detail of WAAF/ATA life FASCINATING. And yes, how it relates to Maddie & Julie too, but mostly the details.

Also, is Julie Julie in her ms, or is she Verity?

p. 147 Any mention of Ravensbruck instantly makes me think of Corrie ten Boom and Mother Maria Skoptsova. So even the real world is full of heroines.

p. 155 ” I don’t believe it for a minute–that we wouldn’t have become friends somehow–that an unexploded bomb wouldn’t have gone off and blown us both into the same crater or that God himself wouldn’t have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight.” Another one of those lines I love, for no discernible reason, just because it’s so right.

p. 159 JAMIE!

p. 161 Oh, the EGG. I remember this bit from the first time–soft boiled eggs are my favorite breakfast so I entirely identify with Maddie at this point.

p. 170 The radio interview was one of those moments when, during the first read, I could tell SOMETHING was up, but couldn’t quite tell what (I was also galloping through at a prodigious rate). I’m not sure if knowing now makes it better or worse.

p. 172 “Truth is the daughter of time” GREAT. Now I am crying over Richard III as well as Julie!

p. 174 The first time through, I was so dreadfully afraid that Maddie actually had died. At least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about now.

p. 185 “There’s glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will.”

p. 214 OH JULIE.

p. 224 I have been crying for the last four pages straight. My book now has tear marks all over it.

p. 230 “It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it?” As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend wmight wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, You stupid ass, just wait a minute and she’ll open her eyes! Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time. But they always do.” This is so brilliant and so tragic on so many levels, including the commentary on the hair-thin line of comedy & tragedy that Shakespeare always walks.

p. 232 “All children, except one, grow up.” I thought this was the return one, for some reason. As it is, it feels like a ghastly piece of foreshadowing.

p. 243 Oh, Von Linden, I still do not understand you, as is right and proper.

p. 249 Oh, I just realized–Julie & Jamie both holding onto Maddie’s shoulder at key moments. How lovely.

p. 266 There’s such a power in Julie giving her name, finally 1) showing us her truest self and 2) refusing to allow v.L. & the other Nazis to define her. She’s not Scheherazade, she’s not Flight Officer Beaufort-Smith. She’s Julie.

I don’t find Maddie’s narrative nearly as harrowing as Julie’s–the first time there was the sheer relief of finding out that she’s alive; this time I know she’s alive. Also, at the moment she’s stuck in the Thibauts’ barn, so nothing much is happening.

p 317 JAMIE!!

p. 329 I love the fact that Maddie writes the end of her narrative in Etienne Thibaut’s old birdwatching journal. I love the complexity of it, the fact that there are no easy answers.

This time through I keep coming back to the idea that Julie wrote partly for von Linden and partly for Anna Engel, but mostly for Maddie. Because Maddie’s right: “if she is not already dead she is counting on me, whispering my name to herself in the dark.” And I can’t help but think that Julie was writing for Maddie–trusting that somehow, someday she would read it. However unlikely that is.

p. 350 Nothing coherent, just tears.

p. 364 I actually love Anna Engel. What a marvelously shaded character–like all the Gestapo, only more so.

p. 379 “One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.”

Oh, Maddie.

p. 391 “I can tell when Julie’s been crying. Not just because she says so, but because the writing goes all smeary and the paper crinkles. Her tears. dried on these pages, are mixed up with mine making them wet again.” And in a nice bit of meta, my tears are making THESE pages crinkly.

We are still a sensational team.

p. 428 JAMIE!!!

p. 439 “But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.”

Ah, yes, I remember this too–getting through the whole thing, finally, and reading the afterward and getting to the last line and breaking down in floods of tears.

So, I finished. I managed to read Code Name Verity again. And in some ways it was easier, knowing what was going to happen. In some ways it was harder. But I seem to have, even more strongly the sense of Julie-and-Maddie, two friends together. And of these two paragraphs, from Maddie:

“What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true–Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.
“And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here Afraid and exhausted, alone but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb–alive, alive, ALIVE.”

Times cried: 16 (at least; I may have missed a few at the end)