The name’s Sutro. Marian Sutro. Alas, the temptation to write that is just too strong, even after a conversation with Simon Mawer about his new novel, Tightrope, and its lead character reveals a good-natured frustration with the fixations of the press.

Reviews of Tightrope have been good. They have also evinced a fascination with the parts of Mawer’s story that deal with spies and spying. One critic – rather close to home – went further, declaring that Mawer has created “the female James Bond”.

“I’m glad you came back to that because I’d almost forgotten it,” Mawer says with a dry laugh, after a dinner given by his American publisher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I’m a fairly easygoing chap, I don’t get excited about things. But there’s no way that’s a reasonable comment about Marian Sutro.”

It may be an explicable comment. Mawer’s novel does not only, thanks to its striking jacket, look like a spy thriller. It is a spy thriller – a literary one for sure, but still a thrilling read about a spy.

Sutro is a young woman who in her first appearance, in Trapeze – published in 2012, in Britain as The Girl Who Fell From the Sky – joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which ran British agents behind enemy lines during the second world war. She carried out a mission in occupied France, in which she was pushed to a terrifying impasse.

In her second appearance, in a sequel driven as much by Mawer’s devotion to his character as readers’ tantalised fury over the shock ending of Trapeze, Marian returns to London from captivity under the Nazis, in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

As Mawer points out at a reading at Porter Square Books and again at dinner, the novel is a character study. Marian spends the first 250 pages recovering from vividly realised torture – including the Nazis’ own version of waterboarding – and readjusting to civilian life. His novel also surveys the state of a nation: Britain too is exhausted, bruised and battered by war. Only later does Marian re-enter the world of espionage, in a fascinating plot concerning Britain’s somewhat under-appreciated role in the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

With Marian’s return to the clandestine world come Russian agents, atomic secrets and political and sexual seductions, all played out in the ruins of a continent scarred by the Holocaust and shadowed by the bomb, America a sort of presiding absence. Tightrope is thus a literary novel in the armature of a thriller, and as such it both follows the routes of a thriller and departs from them. As Mawer points out, in so doing it is more redolent, if it must be redolent of anything, of Graham Greene than Ian Fleming.

“I think I read [all the Bond books] from being a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old,” he says. “As a follow-on from Biggles. This was Biggles with sex.

“Yes, there is something you can get from Ian Fleming. He has a great command of pacing, he’s got some good technical things. He has sharp descriptions, he’s got the technique of referring specifically to the piece of equipment you’ve got. I think he contributed that and there are others. But at the same time I was also reading Graham Greene and I think my writing was more influenced by him.

“I was actually in a bookshop in Baltimore two days ago and I picked up a new edition of The Quiet American and read the beginning. There’s that moment when Fowler sees the girl standing waiting for Pyle to come home and he knows the girl because she was his lover, and he says: ‘Her name was Phuong, which means phoenix. Although nothing is reborn these days.’ Something like that.

“That’s a classic Graham Greene line, naming the thing and the definition and the precision. And that is the sort of line that Fleming could’ve used. There is a sort of link in Greene and Fleming.”

Marian Sutro lives a rich fictive life, far from the curdled purlieus of Bond-dom – not least in the job she finds with the Franco-British Pacific Union, an idealistic group, working for a sort of Crabbin in a dingy office on High Holborn. There also, in a cameo, is Bertrand Russell, the pacifist philosopher whose views on bombing Russia the author takes delight in bringing back to the light.

Marian does have literary familiars. In Tightrope, she is seen largely through the eyes of an enthralled younger narrator, Sam. He is an unreliable witness and, regarding Marian, his own kind of spy. Echoes of Michael Frayn. Sam’s wondering, increasingly erotic regard of Marian brings to mind William Styron’s Stingo and Sophie, or even Philip Roth’s Zuckerman and Amy Bellette.

In the creation of convincing female characters, Mawer has form of his own. For example, Liesel and Hana in The Glass Room, which made the Booker shortlist in 2009, or Helen Harding of A Jealous God, from 1996. I ask him why that should be.

“Part of my answer is going to sound quite the opposite of a positive Guardian thing,” he says, thoughtfully, “because it actually I suppose could sound sexist. I actually like women, I enjoy the company of women, and I think women are very interesting. And I think they may be more interesting than men, very often.

“Testosterone drive, the masculine thing, is actually pretty dull. It’s important in a rugby match, but it’s not intellectually very interesting. Whereas the female side is very interesting, to do with procreation and … other things. It seems to me very complex, so I’ve always enjoyed it.

“Yes, Marian has meant a great deal to me.”

The first book deals with Marian Sutro’s emergence from adolescence, an Anglo-French girl brought up in Geneva, between any number of worlds. She loses her virginity and experiences first love. The second sees her move through a world itself emerging into the modern era, torn from old certainties by unimaginable violence. Marian has a number of sexual encounters – and fails to feel an iota of guilt. The staid and stuffy one turns out to be her husband, Alan, a former Spitfire pilot.

Not to be turned from a comparison that may after all sell books – Mawer has a healthy American audience, built on The Glass Room and Mendel’s Dwarf, but there is always room for growth – I venture that Marian’s confident sexual freedom may lie behind that “female James Bond” line.

“But Bond’s sexual independence is just absurd,” Mawer counters. “It’s Ian Fleming fantasising. Whereas I was trying to get into the mind of a person who is, I suppose for want of a better word, damaged, and is using her sexuality as a means of trying to find something – love, affection, stability, whatever. That’s what I was doing.

“I was also using, as a partial inspiration, the story of Krystyna Skarbek, who was a most remarkable SOE agent at one point and was a vivacious, attractive woman who behaved like you have always expected a vivacious, attractive man to behave. Her war was absolutely astonishing. She’s been the subject of two biographies, the latest one is by Claire Mully and it’s called … The Spy Who Loved.”

Mawer laughs.

“Oh good Lord, it’s Bond again. In the title.”

Skarbek is also said to have been the inspiration for Vesper Lynd, the first Bond girl in the first Bond novel, Casino Royale. It never ends. Better to move on.

Tightrope is Mawer’s 10th novel, and like others it is touched by personal experience. His Booker long-listed 2003 work, The Fall, had its roots in his own climbing days and a brush with death on Ben Nevis. He spent many years as a biology teacher at the British international school in Rome: Mendel’s Dwarf, from 1998, considered genetics and remains a hit with geneticists.

In the case of Trapeze and Tightrope, Mawer was born in 1948, after the wartime heyday of the SOE, but he comes from an RAF family. His mother worked, briefly, with one of the more famous agents.

“I always have been tremendously interested in the SOE,” he says, “first of all because there is a connection … in that my mother served with a woman called Anne-Marie Walters who was then recruited for the SOE and was parachuted into France. She wrote about her experiences immediately after the war in a prize-winning book, Moondrop to Gascony.”

Anne-Marie Walters is better known to history as Colette, her codename as one of a number of women the British sent to France in part because men of military age would have been too conspicuous. In Tightrope, Mawer sends Marian – alias Alice, Anne-Marie and other names – to the cinema to see Odette, the 1950 SOE thriller that starred Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard and made famous the story of another agent, Odette Sansom Hallowes.

“My mother didn’t know what had happened to Anne-Marie Walters until 1946, when the book came out,” he says. “I had that copy when I was a 10-year-old child. And I’ve always had that interest.

“The first novel I had published, Chimera – you won’t find it except on Abebooks for hundreds of dollars – it’s set in Italy but it’s got a man who is dropped in Italy in the war and then comes back after the war to explore Etruscan archaeology. This has always been there, this idea.”

One of Mawer’s guiding ideas is that fiction is freeing to the writer – that, as he put it in a Guardian interview in 2009, as a novelist “I don’t want to tell the truth. I want to manipulate things as I choose. I want to lie.” In 2015, he says the deception and subterfuge of the SOE and its agents “of course is good” in this way.

“It feeds into interests novelists have,” he says. “Things like identity. These people took on identities, had to become individual people. Both Trapeze and Tightrope have that element in them.

“Who exactly is Marian Sutro? Who does she think she is?”

• Tightrope is published in the US as a paperback and ebook by Other Press, on 3 November 2015