Restless in Espionage Aficionados

Dec 23, 2019 Sam Reaves rated it really liked it

William Boyd writes interesting novels that defy or cross genres, usually in a historical setting. This one was published in 2006 but entwines two plotlines, one set in 1976 and the other in the early years of the Second World War. The framework story focuses on Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother in Oxford in the hot summer of 1976, raising a young son born out of wedlock and making ends meet by tutoring foreign students in English. In the first scene she goes to visit her mother, Sally, a widow li William Boyd writes interesting novels that defy or cross genres, usually in a historical setting. This one was published in 2006 but entwines two plotlines, one set in 1976 and the other in the early years of the Second World War. The framework story focuses on Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother in Oxford in the hot summer of 1976, raising a young son born out of wedlock and making ends meet by tutoring foreign students in English. In the first scene she goes to visit her mother, Sally, a widow living in a cottage out in the Oxfordshire countryside. Mom is acting a little strangely, worried about people in the woods watching her, and Ruth worries she might be going dotty. Sally hands her a manuscript with instructions to read it, and we jump into Sally's back story starting in 1939.
It turns out that Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, daughter of Russian exiles recruited by the British secret service in Paris just before the war; she has concealed her true identity from her daughter all these years. Why she is revealing it now emerges as we cut back and forth between the mother's wartime odyssey and the daughter's current (i.e. mid-seventies) tribulations, which involve an Iranian student hopelessly in love with her and the sleazy brother of her child's German father, who shows up uninvited to crash with her, along with a female companion who just may be a wanted terrorist connected with the Baader-Meinhof gang... It's complicated, in both the mother's and the daughter's lives.
Sally's story will disabuse you of the idea that Fake News is a contemporary innovation; all sides in World War Two constantly pumped out and planted false news stories to confuse enemy intelligence. Sally's mission takes her to the U.S., where the Brits are hard at work overcoming isolationist sentiment to get the Yanks into the war; things get rough when she realizes somebody on her team is an enemy agent. This part of the book features lots of tradecraft, intrigue and a gratifyingly violent climax; it makes a good espionage novel.
The daughter's story is less satisfyingly resolved, at least if you're expecting a thriller; not much comes of any of the conflicts set up except... well, insight I suppose. There is a final resolution of Eva/Sally's story at the point where the two plotlines merge, but it packs less punch than Eva Delectorskaya's moment of truth in 1942. It's as if Boyd thought he had to protect himself from the charge of writing genre fiction by nesting it inside a domestic drama.
In any event, it's an entertaining read, with a reasonably gripping wartime espionage tale inside a look back at Britain in the throes of mid-seventies turbulence, well written and absorbing. ...more

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