While G was visiting from Tampa, we took her to the Spy Museum. And while there, I captured this photo:
Given how compact the radio was for its age, I was curious about its history. A Google search for this model, the M-19, turned up no results.
With more digging, I realized my error: that's not an M19 (M-nineteen) radio; that's a radio provided by MI9 (M-eye-9). And thus I learned about MI9: a World War II era, secret branch of British Intelligence that focused on equipping soldiers for escape and evasion.
This discovery hit close to home. We're practically neighbors with Fort Hunt, a WWII installation known only as 'P.O. Box 1142' during the war, that you guessed it, had a similar mission.
Given my interest in hacking, survival, history and this local connection, I was eager to learn more. A Libby search for one of the main personalities of MI9, Christopher Hutton, turned up not a biography but a novel by Kristina McMorris. Within a few minutes of listening to The Ways We Hide, I was hooked.
I love jumping into a book completely uninformed. So it wasn't until McMorris spent a few chapters unspooling the main character's childhood that it clicked: this is a Long Story.
In my experience, what marks a Short Story isn't so much its length, but the author's use of narrative sleight-of-hand to conjure backstory and depth without explicitly writing it. A Long Story takes the opposite approach: the author delivers comprehensive detail through prose.
All this to say that at times the pace of The Ways We Hide felt a bit slow. Ultimately, all was more than forgiven thanks to the author's notes at the end of the audiobook. Here McMorris explains that one of her primary goals was to educate the public about the difficult stories embedded in The Ways We Hide.
For example, the Christmas Eve crush tragedy that the main character Fenna endures is based on the Italian Hall Disaster. When McMorris gives us a thorough description of this event and its aftermath, she's honoring a real tragedy with real victims. And here was I being an impatient jerk, wishing the story would move along. In short, she was right and I was wrong.
One feature of McMorris's writing that I found myself regularly smiling about was her clue management. As The Ways We Hide unfolds, as with any story, the author faces a dilemma. On one hand, she needs to fully inform her readers about the origin of the knowledge and skills her characters will ultimately deploy. On the other hand, she wants to avoid making the story predictable.
In short, if Fenna is going to be called on to pick a lock, then somewhere in her backstory she needs to have lock-picking experience.
Some clues are simply too obvious to camouflage. For example, once we learn that Fenna is an escape artist on stage, we can guess that she'll be using this skill in real life. And when we learn that she's going behind enemy lines, it's clear she will be using her escape skills to outfox the Nazis.
What I thought McMorris did especially well was how she cleverly reused information; essentially hiding a clue in the 'already used' pile. Consider Fenna's experience with the shady palm reader. At first, this information exists to support the well-rounded nature of Fenna's magic education. Then it pops up again as proof of how uncompromising her foster mother is when it comes to matters of religion. And then, even more surprisingly, this information allows Fenna to develop a method for self-heating soup.
Every time a clue would be reused in a way I hadn't predicted I'd think, well played McMorris, well played.
The Ways We Hide contains a number of twists and turns. Some I saw coming, some I didn't. But it was a moment in the final chapter that caught me the most off guard and added significant depth to the story. In that moment, I thought of McMorris as the magician: all along I'd been watching her perform card tricks, then out of the blue, she made a tiger appear.
The scene I'm speaking of is the moment when Fenna, her foster mother, and her foster daughter are all sitting together on a bed flipping through a family photo album. It's obviously a touching moment, as Fenna ends up feeling a profound sense of belonging. But to me, and perhaps just me, this encounter is so much more.
At this moment, the text takes on fresh meaning by answering the most perplexing of questions: what does it mean to live? Fenna's long and messy journey, which McMorris has carefully shared with us, serves as the answer. To live means to experience both joy and heartache; miracles and grief. Perhaps most importantly, Fenna's life underscores that loss and trauma are not terminal states. When Fenna sits on the bed with Aveleen (sp?) and Mrs. Johnson (sp?), the loss of Ari and her father remain significant. And yet, the love and joy offered by these two women and an unwritten future is powerful in its own right.
I was expecting a number of things from The Ways We Hide, deep thoughts on what it means to live weren't one of them. Bravo, McMorris!
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