Book: MR EINSTEIN'S SECRETARY: SCIENTIST, SECRETARY, SISTER, SPY
Author: Matthew Reilly
Published by: Orion
Price: Rs 799
Matthew Reilly’s book is subtitled “Scientist, Secretary, Sister, Spy”. It is an index of the four identities that the protagonist has in the course of the novel, but it is the secretary and the spy who take up the bulk of it.
Hanna Fischer grows up in Berlin with Albert Einstein as her father’s friend and next-door neighbour who gifts her a moving model of the solar system on her birthday and encourages her father to shift her from an ordinary school to a Gymnasium. She blooms there and is all set for a scientific career when her world falls apart without warning in 1919 and she is promptly shipped off to New York. Her aunt and uncle there, already under straitened circumstances, lose no time in enrolling her in a secretarial course. She comes out of it a winner, topping her class and securing a position as the chief secretary of a billionaire.
While working under him, Einstein comes to the US and a happy coincidence reconnects them in Washington, leading him to ask her boss to loan her as a secretary for three months. By then, she has repaid her student loan and saved enough for a passage to Berlin where she longs to meet the boy she had fallen in love with — only to discover that she has lost him to her sister, a twin with borderline personality disorder, who assumes her life in her absence (a feat she would repeat later). For the second time, Einstein saves Hannah in an encounter. She returns to the US, becomes his secretary again during his visit in 1933 to Caltech and Princeton. She returns to Berlin ahead of him, but he never does; she gets caught up in the unfolding political crisis in Germany and ends up serving Hitler’s men — Albert Speer and Martin Bormann — for the next twelve years.
Hanna displays an appetite for adventure and enormous courage, saving lives several times — from the baby of a gangster in New York to Einstein’s in Berlin to that of Dan Kessler — twice. She also survives many life threats with death-defying stunts. All this makes the narrative racy with relentless action — like the Hollywood spy thrillers that Reilly is known to both admire and emulate. But somewhere, the story is lost in the action: the more it speeds up, the less engaging it becomes. The entire second half of the novel reads more like history capsules of the Third Reich. In the final third, the protagonist almost disappears.
Her character arc is best delineated from her childhood in Berlin to her secretarial years in New York. Hard-working, efficient and compassionate, she gets entangled with the defining moments of inter-War-years New York — Prohibition and gang wars, the Crash and the Great Depression. But it’s her father figures who stay in the reader’s mind — not just Einstein but also Mr Clay Bentley Sr., a billionaire who allowed her an hour of reading, two weekday mornings, because he appreciated her intellectual aspirations. It’s a different matter that fate intervened.
