Although in her “confession” she paints herself as a coward, the reader sympathises with her reaction to the horror of her torture when she writes: What we ascertained from the novel is that Julie is a complex character – Scottish, tiny, wealthy, multi-lingual, aristocratic and well-travelled. Some group members felt they were continually questioning the reality and veritas of the narration and the narrator’s true identity. This quote prompted us to debate the following questions: what is truth? How reliable is Verity/Queenie/Julie as a narrator and how much of the confession of a spy who narrates her story under coercion and torture can possibly be truthful? Many of you suspected that the literal truth conceals deeper truths and felt that there is something deeper happening throughout the novel that initially is hard to place. I have always been good at pretending… But now I know I am a coward … And I’m going to give you anything you ask, everything I can remember.

I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. We began our discussion with a quote from Queenie: Although we felt that Wein could have cut out some of the extraneous aircraft detail from part one, we felt that it was also a deliberate ploy to keep the reader busy intellectually so that when the story is unraveled, and plot twists and turns are revealed in part two, it brings about an emotional reaction that we were not expecting. Some of us struggled with part one and felt it dragged a little but found our efforts of perseverance were well rewarded as part two provided the satisfactory solving of an intellectual puzzle. August Discussion – Code Name Verity by Elizabeth WeinĬode Name Verity was a very challenging and intellectual read.

Code word verity