The Tiger Claw

About the book

The Tiger Claw is the second novel of Shauna Singh Baldwin, published by Knopf Canada in 2004. Inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan, the British Indian agent who worked as a wireless operator for the Special Operations Executive in Nazi-occupied France under the codename Madeleine, it is a story of love and espionage, cultural tension and displacement. It was a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize in 2004.

Baldwin first heard Noor's story at the Safe House, the espionage-themed restaurant in Milwaukee that she and her husband owned, where a former Dutch spy told her of the woman who had left her family in London to spy in occupied France. Intrigued, she travelled to Europe, visited the places where Noor had lived, interviewed people who had known her, and built the novel out of the silences, conflicting stories and gaps she found along the way.

What is The Tiger Claw about?

The novel begins in December 1943, in a German prison cell, where Noor lies shackled hand and foot in the winter cold. Her captor, Herr Vogel, gives her onionskin paper and orders her to write children's stories. She writes them, and secretly writes something else: letters to ma petite, the spirit of the child she conceived with Armand Rivkin, a French Jewish musician and the love of her life. Between the letters and a third-person narrative, her story unfolds.

Noor's American mother had married a Sufi musician and teacher from India. Noor grows up in France close to her liberal father, but after his death her conservative uncle Tajuddin and her brother Kabir govern the family, and as the men of the family they have the legal power to stop her engagement to Armand. She gives him up. When war comes, her family escapes to England and Armand's stays behind. Recruited to train as a resistance radio operator, Noor accepts: outwardly to help defeat the Germans, inwardly to find Armand.

In France she lives under layered names: Nora Baker in training, Anne-Marie Regnier, a woman caring for a sick aunt, to her neighbours, and Madeleine to her network. She transmits from safe houses while agents around her are picked off one by one through a double agent, and she rents an apartment across the street from Drancy, the camp where Armand is held, to send him the tiger claw pendant she wears for luck and courage.

The real Noor Inayat Khan

The woman behind the novel was Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914 to 1944), born in Moscow to an Indian Sufi teacher and musician and an American mother, and raised in London and in Suresnes, near Paris. As an SOE agent under the codename Madeleine she became the first female wireless operator sent from Britain into occupied France. Betrayed and captured, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp on 13 September 1944, and was posthumously awarded the George Cross, Britain's highest civilian decoration for gallantry. Baldwin has said she wanted to retell Noor's story from Noor's own point of view, against earlier versions that had made her an exotic mystery.

Themes: loyalty, faith and occupation

Noor is caught between loyalties that pull in opposite directions. She fights the occupation of France on behalf of a Britain that still occupies India. She is held between her dead father's liberal Sufi teachings, her uncle's stricter Islam, and a forbidden love across the religious line. The publisher notes that the novel's portrayal of intolerance mirrors our own times, and Baldwin herself has said that for her, Noor's story is about the triumph of love and hope over the forces that try to kill our compassion and our humanity.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal in 1962 into a Punjabi family and raised in India, and she lives in Milwaukee. She came to Noor's story with a prizewinning first novel behind her: What the Body Remembers (1999) had won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada and Caribbean region. Before the novels she had hosted the radio show Sunno! and published English Lessons and Other Stories (1996). Her third novel, The Selector of Souls, followed in 2012.

Reception and legacy

The Tiger Claw was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2004, Canada's leading fiction prize, confirming Baldwin in the front rank of Canadian novelists after the Commonwealth success of her first novel. The book has kept Noor Inayat Khan's name before readers who might never open a war history, and the novel has been optioned for film by 108 Media. For Punjabi and South Asian readers it holds a particular place: a Sufi Muslim heroine from an Indian family, written by a Sikh novelist from the diaspora, at the centre of a European war story.

Read it if

Read it if you want a Second World War spy story whose heroine breaks every mould of the genre; if Noor Inayat Khan's real courage has reached you through her memorials and you want the imagined inner life behind them; or if you are following how diaspora writers retell the big histories of the twentieth century through the people those histories usually leave at the edge of the frame.