THROUGH HER LENS

A photographic interpreter in World War II-era England uses her skills to serve her country while hoping for more for herself in Bacon’s debut novel.

It is 1943 at Royal Air Force Base Medmenham near Buckinghamshire, England, where a number of women are employed as photographic interpreters to identify threats from German-occupied areas on the continent. Millicent “Millie” Trayford had been stationed at Coastal Command at RAF Wick, where she identified immediate threats, but, due to her father’s intervention, she’s moved to RAF Medmenham, the Central Intelligence Unit headquarters. She isn’t happy about the transfer, assuming that she’ll be looking for minutiae when she would rather be taking and publishing photographs of wartime women in England. (“She wanted to capture women’s vitality with her camera before their contributions in the war effort were lost to history.”) She arrives at Medmenham, and soon there are problems, both personal and work-related: Her childhood governess, Nanna Clara, dies in a bombing; the Germans may have a secret weapons program at Peenemunde; and then there is her fiance, Elliot, a pilot, who goes missing while flying over France. Meanwhile, the Germans are rumored to be building superbombs that may even fly on their own, and Millie can only hope that the government will take action on the intelligence she and her colleagues gather before more civilians die. Bacon’s novel does a fine job of transporting the reader into a very specific part of wartime Britain’s intelligence-gathering efforts and stays laser focused on that aspect of the war. Weaving in personal stories, including the disappearing fiance, heightens the plausibility of an already well-researched and well-executed story. Millie’s creative spirit and can-do attitude make her an engaging protagonist. Some sections of the book are dialogue-heavy, and the action can bounce from place to place too quickly, but, overall, the book is held together by its strong characters and narrative.

A unique story about women in WWII that succeeds in making historical events feel personal.