THE BORODINO SACRIFICE - Book review

Paul Phillips’s spy thriller The Borodino Sacrifice (published 2024) is the first book in the Chasing Mercury trilogy. 

I can see why Phillips dedicated it in memory of Peter O’Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise thrillers: the novel is fast-paced and introduces us to two characters who end up facing dangers together – in a similar manner to Modesty and Willie Garvin.

I’m a sucker for word-play in titles, chapter headings etc. There are four parts. 1 – Between the Lines; 2 – Behind the Curtain; 3 – Beneath the Ashes; 4 – Upon the Mountains. So we have four different yet relevant prepositions.

We start with US sergeant Sam Bradley protecting a Brit spy, Jones, in the Moravian forest when a violent altercation occurs between a partisans. Inevitably there’s plenty of action at this time of Cessation of Hostilities at the close of World War II in Europe. Czechoslovakia is a mess, with national militias, partisans, communists and anti-communist guerrillas on the rampage... Bradley’s observant and memory-scarred. ‘... the Red Army mechanics had the  jeep repaired by midday. Bradley wished flesh and blood was as responsive’ (p155).

Jones wants Bradley to find one of his people who is missing: Ludmila Suková, codename ‘Mercury’. Usually called Mila. She is almost a force of nature. ‘... there was something else about her, something real and strangely potent’ (p241). Mila is a layered character, an enigma, somebody who never gives up, no matter what obstacles get in her way. Like many spies, she used a poem to encrypt her messages, reminiscent of Violette Szabo’s written for her by Leo Marks in 1941; Mila’s is by W.B. Yeats. Gradually, we learn of her backstory and it seems the past has come to define her. Mila is on a quest of her own.

Bradley’s quest takes him to Berlin where he witnesses the devastation as well as the amazing rubble-women clearing away the detritus of war. Where there are razed buildings there are bodies: ‘Summer heat – the dead were making themselves known’ (p76).

Phillips's power of description puts you in the scene: ‘Smoke caressed the cobwebbed roof-space. The derelict mill was poorly shuttered and dusty beams of late afternoon sun were slinking across the walls. (He) heard an insect trapped somewhere, and the ticking of a watch’ (p55). And: ‘The sinking sun had turned the windows of the terraced tenements to molten ingots’ (p216).

His action scenes are intense; you can almost hear the shell casings hit the ground. However, it is not all action. Sometimes there’s poignancy. One individual reflects: ‘His heart had been buoyed by the last blessing, the tenderness of a woman, even directed at a worm such as he – a traitor, a nothing, a black joke, a geography teacher in a land without place names or frontiers, on a continent with its populations upended, in a world where the maps were redundant’ (p58).

The story has depth and is well researched, brilliantly evoking this period of post-war confusion. The assassination attempt on Heydrich in 1942 is pertinent. Men from GRU, NKVD and Smersh are plotting and loyalties are tested in grey areas. Behind the scenes the future of Czechoslovakia is and its people is being determined...

At the end of the book the reader is quite breathless. Happily, as you will be aware from the first sentence, there are two more in the continuing saga of Bradley and Mila. (I suppose that constitutes being labelled as a ‘spoiler’ – both survive the tense travails of this book!)

Note:

Berlin's rubble-women are detailed in Volume 4 of my Collected Stories - 18 history tales, Codename Gaby.