Eye of the Needle
by Ken Follett
Summary
British intelligence calls him Die Nadel, the Needle, for the stiletto that is his signature: Henry Faber, the Reich's best agent in England, a professional so disciplined he has spent the war as a nondescript railway clerk, transmitting little, wasted by his masters, waiting for the assignment that justifies him. In 1944 it arrives. Poking through East Anglia, Faber photographs the invasion army massing opposite Calais and sees what no analyst in Berlin has dared conclude: the army is plywood and inflatable rubber, Patton's famous force a stage set, and the real blow is aimed at Normandy. One man now carries the Allies' entire deception in his head, and the novel is the race to stop the head reaching a U boat.
Follett runs the chase up the length of wartime Britain with the confidence of a veteran, though he was twenty eight: the murders that mark Faber's trail, the plodding, closing pursuit by MI5's professor spycatcher, and then the masterstroke, a storm that wrecks Faber's rendezvous and throws him ashore on Storm Island, a rock off Scotland whose only inhabitants are David, a pilot embittered by the crash that took his legs, and his wife Lucy, marooned in a dead marriage. The final act belongs to her, the thriller narrowing to one woman who slowly understands what the charming castaway is, and must beat the best agent in Europe with weather, wit and nerve.
Around three hundred and forty pages, engineered like a watch.
Best for readers who want the wartime chase thriller in its definitive modern form, and an ending that hands the genre's climax, for once, to a housewife with everything to lose.
Historical Context & Significance
Eye of the Needle won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1979 and sold in the millions, the breakout that turned Ken Follett from a young London publishing hand writing paperbacks under pseudonyms into one of the bestselling novelists alive; he was twenty eight when it appeared, originally as Storm Island, and the retitled book fixed the formula his blockbusters kept, meticulous history carrying propulsive melodrama.
The premise sits on real foundations, the FUSAG deception that protected D-Day and the double cross system that had, in fact, left Germany no honest eyes in Britain, Faber being the nightmare counterfactual: the one agent the system missed.
Richard Marquand's 1981 film gave Donald Sutherland the role. Follett's later empire, the Pillars of the Earth cathedral epics outselling even the thrillers, never displaced this as the craft benchmark; the Edgar remains its professional certification, the young man's machine judged against the year's masters and preferred.