Tunnel 29 - a review
Be it bite-sized or with a little more on the bone, no matter how you like your book recommendations, this one has you covered.
For those with only enough time for a snack, click here, and for those who want to savour the flavour a little more deeply, here’s a book which has exactly nothing at all to do with food other than it gets eaten by characters in the books, and comes with the official Finest Hour seal of approval.
Let’s continue before this analogy crumbles into pieces.
Tunnel 29 - Helena Merriman
Rarely do I agree with 100% of the grabs, blurbs and catch-phrases slapped on the covers of books. You’ve seen them all before, “Unputdownable”, “A page-turner of the highest regard”, “A breakthrough entrant into the genre”.
Designed to grab your attention in an attempt to stand out from the crowd, and likely now all AI-generated, for whichever edition of this particular book you can find - it seems the robots are evolving.
Tunnel 29 tells the true story of a group of German students trapped (in various ways) between East and West Berlin in 1962, and their attempts to tunnel between the two.
Helena Merriman (presumably not a robot) has crafted an astonishing piece of work which blends history, biography, literary non-fiction and painstaking, intimate research.
Reading it is like having a movie play out in your head and strikes that elusive balance of describing enough of the detail to paint the picture, without feeling like you’re slogging your way through a history textbook.
Tunnel 29 - Helena Merriman (PublicAffairs, 2021)
I barrelled through this book over a summer weekend and was sad to put it down. Sad because it was over, but also with a lingering melancholy over the entire affair.
Having previously read books on the Berlin Airlift, the annexing of Berlin (and Germany for that matter), they’d either been from a military perspective, or spy-novels steeped in fiction, capturing very little of the immediate and enduring cultural impact.
While we’re certainly not proposing to enter into the eternal Capitalism vs. Communism debate anytime soon here on the blog, Tunnel 29 gives some incredible and thought-provoking insights into not only the unwavering determination of Joachim Rudolph and his co-tunnellers, but life on both sides of the Wall.
I’ve already recommended this book to two friends who both enjoyed it.
You will as well.
Tunnel 29 gets 4 out of 5 Finest Hour timers.
