THE TRIANGLE. Jack Agnew AuthorHouse, Milton Keynes, 2007. Paperback, ix and 290 pages, £7.70. ISBN 1 4259 6860 1.

There are plenty of works which come under the heading of fiction, which might as well be documentaries of the events they describe, so well are they researched from the point of view of their historical or other subject-matter. You can write an account of, say, a tornado sweeping across New Mexico from the viewpoint of the people affected by it, their lives, their reactions, how the inner dramas of their lives interact with the cosmic events around them, or simply how they cope with the cataclysm. Or you can write about it from a scientific standpoint – how the event compares with other similar catastrophies, what caused this particular tornado and so on. Events described in a fictional way that mirror the fear, passion, exhilaration of a specific non-fictional era or series of events are notoriously difficult to depict while keeping the facts of those events undistorted by the writer’s pen.
     Here is one such attempt that seems to succeed. Jack Agnew has clearly researched the minutiae of his topic, a group of Freemasons who become a ‘triangle’ in the French Resistance in the second World War, performing intelligence and other activities facilitating Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France. He has portrayed some little-known aspects both of history on the broad canvas, and notably of Freemasonry in particular. He has a knack of bringing alive the way in which the emotions of the participants of this story are windswept by the obstacles and dangers they encounter, and the end result is a moving portrait of triumph, and also defeat, in the face of the malevolence they encounter. The only real problem I have with this story is not the author, but the very sloppy editing, evinced by more errors of punctuation and inconsistency of spelling than I care to count. My advice to this very imaginative author would be to find himself a decent publisher, but the story is a good read nevertheless.

Julian Rees