The Key to Rebecca
by Ken Follett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ken FollettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-04
ISBN: 0451207793
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: NAL Trade
Book Reviews of The Key to Rebecca
Book Review: Solid fluff.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ken Follett's "The Key To Rebecca" is a thriller told in parallel thread following the duplicitous, clandestine, and nefarious activities German-Arab spy Wolff, and his gallant Dorset-English pursuer Vandeman in early 1940's Egypt, as Erwin "The Desert Fox" Rommell's campaign to take Cairo unfolds.
Follett's historical setting serves as an excellent background, and the on-the-ground details of like in war-time Egypt provide welcome exotic atmosphere. While Follett's style is too lean to neither taste the dust nor feel the heat and sweat, it is enough to provide suspension of disbelief.
The principal characters are fairly well drawn for a lean thriller. Wolff is of course a borderline personality disorder/sociopath, which of course does not really fully explain the lengths he goes to to help Arab and German causes. His unique background of being a full-blooded-German whose widowed mother marries a wealthy settled Alexandrian Bedouin-Arab provides his ability to blend in both three worlds: Arab-Egyptian Cairo, European occupied and populated Egypt, and the nomadic Bedouins. He is sexually if not amorously involved with Cairo's most famous belly dancer, and shares her degenerate kinks and lusts and gluttony for expensive pleasures.
British Intelligence army officer Vandeman is widowed, with a precocious eight year-old boy, which sets him up for plausible romantic entanglement with curvaceous and courageous Egyptian Jew concubine Elene, who has her own interior problems reconciling herself with her circumstances, estrangement from her pious Orthodox family, and her interest in this cold Englishman who wishes her to use her wiles to penetrate Wolff's world and capture his apparatus and code for communicating to Rommell.
There are a few stock comic characters for occasional relief, the perfidious boss, the buffoonish petty officer, clever and disgusting Arab crooks, and the chase scenes are a little over orchestrated, as if they were pre-directed for the cinema, but otherwise the tale unfolds in the page-turner pace of thrillers everywhere. While this novel says nothing deeper than "Nazis bad, English good" this is a solid B+ of a thriller on technical merit and being an exemplar of the genre.
Summary of The Key to Rebecca
Ken Follett?s The Key to Rebecca took readers and critics by storm when first published more than fifteen years ago. Today, it remains one of the best espionage novels ever written.
A brilliant and ruthless Nazi master agent is on the loose in Cairo. His mission is to send Rommel?s advancing army the secrets that will unlock the city?s doors. In all of Cairo, only two people can stop him. One is a down-on-his-luck English officer no one will listen to. The other is a vulnerable young Jewish girl?.
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