With The Cipher (Signature Editions 2024, 239 p.), Genni Gunn has written a masterful work that captures the sacrifices of people during war time. It is also a powerful love story set during World War II. The main characters, Olivia and Nino, are working as agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British group conducting espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage in occupied Europe. Olivia is the British-born daughter of Italian parents living in London. Because of her hyperthymesia, the ability to recall experiences in precise detail, she is recruited into the SOE and loses contact with her family, to whom she has been very close and which is part of her identity.
From London, Olivia is sent to Cairo for further cipher training. There she meets Nino, an anti-fascist Italian, fighting a clandestine guerilla war against Nazis and Italian Fascists in North Africa. They develop a strong attraction from their first encounter but are often separated by dangerous military assignments. Complicating their passionate relationship is the personal guilt they feel because they each have romantic partners waiting for them at home: Bianca for Nino and Philip for Olivia. They each must take on false identities and cover stories to hide their perilous activities and at times seem to lose their true sense of self. It becomes clear that they both feel very deep regret for the betrayal they are inflicting on the partners waiting back home.
After the Allies occupy Sicily, Nino and his crew are parachuted behind German lines in southern Italy. Olivia is also in Sicily working for the British army, decoding German communications about troop movements. Later, disguised as a nurse, she is sent on a suicide mission into German occupied territory. Near the Adriatic Sea, Olivia and Nino witness the surprise German bombing of Bari harbour on December 2, 1943 which killed over 1,000 servicemen and hundreds of civilians. They barely escape with their lives. In her narrative Gunn also skilfully includes several atrocities that took place during the war in Rome and other cities. These mass killings of civilians involved the cooperation of Fascist agents helping the Nazi occupation of Italy. Later, Olivia goes missing for several months, and we learn about the capture and execution of Mussolini by partisans near Milan.
The chapters are written from the different points of view of Olivia and Nino, and they reveal the misunderstandings that can arise from behaviour under the pressure of dangerous assignments in war. They do not know from one day to the next if they will live or die. We read their interior monologues full of doubts and their love letters full of passion. These letters are printed in italics: “Nino, my love, I want to see you, to be surrounded by your arms… Gunn has carefully structured a very complex story and keeps us in suspense as the action moves across the Mediterranean into Italy. Different chapters recount diverse settings over time: London, 1939; Abyssinia, 1941; Egypt, 1943; Salerno, 1943; Bari, 1944; Trieste, 1948. Olivia’s super memory can be a curse as she is forced to relive in vivid detail some of the tragic scenes of war most people would want to forget. She seems to have little control over such disturbing visions. Genni Gunn uses the conflict of war to create the tension in many scenes of the novel. The accurate historical settings contribute to the realism of the story.
The last sections of the novel take place after the end of the war and are told from the point of view of Nino’s daughter, Bella. Her parents’ troubled marriage is explained in some detail and with a surprise at the end. They are living in the city of Trieste in the north-eastern corner of Italy on the border with Yugoslavia. It was a region of territorial conflicts from before the war. Nino is in charge of the police force meant to keep peace as the fate of Trieste is decided between the Italians and Tito’s Communists. There are several groups often fighting one another in the streets: Antifascists, Neo-Nazis, Communists, Slovene Italians and other agitators. A bomb is discovered under Nino’s car and, eventually, Nino and his family are forced to leave the city for their own safety. Nino becomes very disillusioned with Italian society after the war, given all the sacrifices he made to bring peace and freedom to his beloved country. “Historical atrocities, he thought, are like inheritances passed down one generation to the next, leaving everyone wavering in the midst of everywhere and nowhere.”
There are passages in the novel in which Genni Gunn reveals that this war story was inspired by the activities of her father who worked for British intelligence. Nino’s hometown is Pozzecco near Udine in Friuli, while Gunn’s father, Leo Donati, was from Udine. She was born in Trieste, but the family had to leave for their own safety. When Bella tells us about her father and mother, some of the words could be read as Gunn’s own experiences with her parents. At the time of Gunn’s birth, Trieste was a very dangerous place. To get some idea of the horrors that took place there during the war we can visit Risiera di San Sabba, which was a rice mill that the Nazis converted into a concentration camp for the detention and killing of prisoners. It had a crematorium for the incineration of bodies. Jews were deported to Auschwitz from there. It is now a war memorial in direct contrast to the very beautiful city of Trieste. The Risiera is not in this novel, but Olivia does tell us about the concentration camp she was rescued from near the end of the war.
The Cypher is an engrossing novel with memorable characters who stay with the reader long after we finish the last page. There are several other Italian-Canadian authors who emigrated to Canada as a result of the devastation of World War II, and who have gone back to write about family experiences of the war and their love-hate relationship with Italy. Among them are Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa, and Mary di Michele’s Bicycle Thieves.
Read an excerpt from The Cipher by Genni Gunn here.
Joseph Pivato was born in Italy as World War II ended. His books about Italian-Canadian writers include Mary di Michele, Frank Paci, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Caterina Edwards, Rina Cralli, and essays on Antonio D’Alfonso, Pasquale Verdicchio, Licia Canton, and many others.
