The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border
FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS
(JONATHAN CAPE, 240 PP, £18.99)
tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

As Axis forces approached Cairo in May 1942, “the British downplayed the panic by calling it ‘The Flap’… It was not encouraging, therefore, to see thick smoke rising from the British Embassy… where they had started to burn their files … Some papers were blown intact high in the air, to be recycled into little cones by the (unflappable) local peanut-vendors.”

In The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border , Frances Stonor Saunders vividly captures the horror and absurdity of life in the theatre of conflict, and human versatility. The book is positioned as a search for her dead father and framed by her anxiety about their relationship, expressed in purplish questions which punctuate the narrative. It is named for an unopened suitcase of his papers. Alfred Hitchcock popularised the term “MacGuffin” for an item which motivates the protagonist but is unimportant in itself. (Less picturesque than the suitcase in the attic is the archival research that supplied the book’s detail, but this exciting tale is hidden in the endnotes.) The suitcase matters as a representative of all suitcases hurriedly packed by refugees, and everything heartbreakingly unable to fit into them.