Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly (Orion)

If you had a life as, well, interesting as Hanna Fischer’s, you too might like to retire from it all in your mid-40s.

This page-turner of a rollicking novel, albeit with some very dark moments, opens with Hanna’s funeral on a freezing January New Jersey day in 1948. The person delivering the eulogy is the great Einstein, who was handily Hanna’s neighbour when she was a bright little girl in Berlin in 1912.

Hanna is a fictional character, but many of the people she comes across in this thriller are only too real.

When Hanna meets Einstein he has not achieved worldwide fame, and works from a modest apartment in the city. Apart from being brilliant, he is also interested in the people around him being, in Hanna’s words, boundlessly enthusiastic – for physics, for discovery, for life, for the sheer pursuit of joy.

From a young age Hanna’s obvious intelligence – she tells Einstein she wants to be the greatest physicist in the world when she grows up – piques Einstein’s interest, which proves to be a life-saver for her in the tumultuous years ahead.

Hanna has an identical twin sister, Ooma, who has serious mental health problems and who, at the beginning of this story is in a sanatorium. Ooma will keep popping up, usually to malevolent effect.

The girls’ mother is American but is murdered when Hanna is a teen. Their father is a senior civil servant in Germany’s difficult years after World War 1. He becomes one of the Germans to sign the Versailles Peace Treaty after the war, which leads to his being vilified as a traitor as the Nazis start to grow in strength.

One terrible night when Hanna is 17 and in her final year of school, she comes home to find her father has been strung up from a lamppost outside their home. Fearful that something like this could happen, her father has given Einstein a letter for Hanna and a sum of money to enable her to flee the country.

Einstein sees her on to a ship bound for New York, where she has an aunt. She has to abandon her dreams of studying physics – now she is lucky to get a place at a secretarial school.

The ups and downs that follow are sometimes unlikely, but make for a hell of a story.

Prohibition is introduced in the US in January 1920, driving drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, in the prescient words of Mark Twain.

As a secretarial student Hanna works hard but occasionally goes to speakeasies with her co-students, where she comes across some pretty dodgy characters, based on real people, and gets caught up in some alarming situations.

She graduates, gets an excellent job as a secretary, and is eventually poached by Einstein, who by this time is based in the US and famous around the world. Thanks to him she returns to Germany, where she is trapped by the outbreak of World War 2 and ends up working for the Nazis Albert Speer, and later Martin Bormann.

By this time she is also an American spy… reporting to her handler on Nazi Germany’s developing rocket technology.

Based on this summary, the story really does seem far-fetched, but if you suspend disbelief, you’ll have your hands on an extraordinary historical thriller.

Years ago I read Denys Reitz’s Commando, about his role in the Boer War, and how his relationship with Jan Smuts led to his being where things were happening, up to and including London during WW2. Hanna is a bit like Reitz, part of everything – not always in a good way.

Mr Einstein’s Secretary is not Matthew Reilly’s usual oeuvre – he is better known as an action thriller writer – but he brings these skills to Hanna’s story. In an interview published at the end of the book, he says he wanted this to be an epic, a story that spans decades.

It took him five years to write, and required an enormous amount of research, ranging from life in the Weimar Republic, the New York gangs of the 1920s, the training of a good secretary, the unspeakable events of WW2, the necessity to have a grasp of physics and the work that was being done in Germany towards the end of the war.

Asked to comment on what a change this is from his usual novels, Reilly says: “It is different, yes, although I like to think… it still has that fast and furious ‘Matthew Reilly engine’ propelling it along.”

I think he’s nailed it.

• Mr Einstein’s Secretary was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for June.