Restless

published	2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
binding	Paperback
isbn	0747589372 (isbn13: 9780747589372)
pages	336
literary awards	2006 Costa Award (Novel)
description	Sally Gilmartin can’t escape her past. Living in the idyllic English countryside in 1976, Sally is haunted by her experiences during the Second W...more [close] Sally Gilmartin can’t escape her past. Living in the idyllic English countryside in 1976, Sally is haunted by her experiences during the Second World War. She also suspects someone is trying to kill her. With mounting fear, Sally confides with her daughter Ruth; a woman struggling with her own past. Sally drops a bombshell. She is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré recruited as a spy by the British prior to the Second World War. For the past thirty years, Eva has led a second life hiding from the ghosts of her past. Eva reveals her secret to her daughter through a series of written chapters for a planned book. As Ruth delves into her mother’s writing, she learns the shocking truth. Eva was recruited in Paris prior to the Second World War, following the death of her brother Kolia; also a British spy. Taught by an enigmatic spymaster named Lucas Romer, Eva learned the art of espionage and was made part of a unit specializing in media manipulation. Above all, she was taught ‘Rule Number One’ of spying: trust no one — a rule broken when she and Romer began a dangerous love affair. The affair had tragic consequences. In 1941, Eva and Romer were assigned to the United States. They were given the task of manipulating the American media into motivating the public to support entry into the war on the Allied side. While in New York, Eva’s affair with Romer set in motion events that culminated in her betrayal and her flight from the British Secret Services. She found eventual refuge in a new life as Sally Gilmartin. Thirty years later, Eva’s identity unravels with her confession to her daughter. Ruth struggles with the truth, and her own recent past fills her with self-doubt and insecurity. A failed relationship in Germany resulted in a son and an eventual return to England. Her mother’s confession leads Ruth to the realization that her mother is entangling her in one final mission — a showdown with Eva’s past betrayer. Restless twists and turns through the double life of one remarkable woman. Through Eva’s life, William Boyd asks the intriguing question — How well do we truly know someone? [close]
date added	02-06-07 edit book

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Alistair rated it:

04/29/08

recommended to Alistair by: my daughter sorry !
recommends it for: someone on a long haul flight with 24 hours to spare

i just about stayed with this to the end but for a good writer like william boyd , i found it underwhelming .
the characters are very thin and a lot of them pointless , the plot creaks like a House of Horror film door , and most of the writing is cliched . most of what Boyd seems to know about spying seems to have come from the Mail on Sunday

here are some gems that i noticed

here is Romer , supposedly a big cheese spy ,explaining the rules of spying " don't trust anyone " he ...more

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Robert rated it:

09/18/07

Read in October, 2006

William Boyd’s new novel, Restless, is a historical spy novel, a curious departure for him, but similar to Any Human Heart and The New Confessions in that it reconstructs a biography of a fictional historical character, as if that character were writing his or her autobiography. In this case, the character is Eva Delectorskaya, a former spy for the U.K. before and during the Second World War. Her daughter, Ruth Gilmartin, knows nothing of her mother’s past until 1976, wh...more William Boyd’s new novel, Restless, is a historical spy novel, a curious departure for him, but similar to Any Human Heart and The New Confessions in that it reconstructs a biography of a fictional historical character, as if that character were writing his or her autobiography. In this case, the character is Eva Delectorskaya, a former spy for the U.K. before and during the Second World War. Her daughter, Ruth Gilmartin, knows nothing of her mother’s past until 1976, when her mother explains that her identity and past are a complete fiction. Eva has written an autobiography and is feeding it to Ruth one chapter at a time. The action switches between Eva’s wartime memoir and the “present.” In 1976, Eva seems to believe someone is after her for what she did way back then. But we don’t know why that should be (as it isn’t revealed in her memoir until later in the book), so there is a sense of possible menace (or is it merely paranoia?) combined with a mystery. This is an amazingly contrived structure, but because the past and present stories are so interesting, I am willing to overlook it.

What amazes me, though, is that Boyd is repeating almost the exact same structure as he did in The New Confessions—the autobiography alternating with increasingly paranoid episodes set in the present. The characters and plot of the two books are quite different, but this similarity in structure is striking, as are the peripatetic travels of the protagonists. Boyd likes taking his English characters (or Russian-English, in the case of Eva) and sending them on American road trips.

I don’t fault Boyd for using this structure again. (Maybe a little for the contrivance of the doled-out memoir, but that’s ok.) So much of his work is about how a relatively ordinary present can be the result of a highly improbable past. Ruth worries briefly that her mother’s current paranoia and weird acts are a sign of mental or neurological illness (as this happened to her father before he died). But even though Eva’s fears seem to have been unfounded, we discover over the course of the novel that they were anything but irrational.

A subplot has Ruth very tangentially involved with someone who she believes might have been involved with the Baader-Meinhof Gang. This parallels Eva’s fears, and I think is meant to show that the kind of crazy situation Eva was in could happen to the most ordinary person (Ruth), and that it is easy to jump to paranoid conclusions.

This was a totally enjoyable novel—not quite up to my favorite, The New Confessions, but certainly equal to Stars and Bars and The Blue Afternoon. I wonder how much of the scenario Boyd lays out is true—or at least plausible....less

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Restless

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