A masterful and thrilling espionage novel from one of the most talented authors of his generation. Full of tension and drama, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its finest. Now a major TV movie adaptation by The Sundance Channel and the BBC.
It is Paris, 1939. Twenty-eight year old Eva Delectorskaya is at the funeral of her beloved younger brother. Standing among her family and … and friends she notices a stranger. Lucas Romer is a patrician looking Englishman with a secretive air and a persuasive manner. He also has a mysterious connection to Kolia, Eva’s murdered brother. Romer recruits Eva and soon she is traveling to Scotland to be trained as a spy and work for his underground network. After a successful covert operation in Belgium, she is sent to New York City, where she is involved in manipulating the press in order to shift American public sentiment toward getting involved in WWII.
Three decades on and Eva has buried her dangerous history. She is now Sally Gilmartin, a respectable English widow, living in a picturesque Cotswold village. No one, not even her daughter Ruth, knows her real identity. But once a spy, always a spy. Sally has far too many secrets, and she has no one to trust. Before it is too late, she must confront the demons of her past. This time though she can’t do it alone, she needs Ruth’s help. Restless is a thrilling espionage novel set during the Second World War and a haunting portrait of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its finest.
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RESTLESS by William Boyd is one of those novels with a parallel plot. There is the present-day told from the point-of-view of Ruth Gilmartin a 20-something PhD student at Oxford and a single Mum. Then there is the story of Eva Delectorskaya, a woman of Russian-English heritage, working as a spy for Britain in New York in 1940 and 1941. Her job was to pose as a journalist spreading disinformation about the progress of the war in an effort to encourage the United States to join the fight against the Nazis.
This may sound only moderately interesting, but in William Boyd’s hands it becomes completely gripping. Both POV characters, Ruth and Eva, are so real. While it is true that inevitably Ruth’s story is not that interesting, nevertheless, her story kept me glued to the page, partly because I’m old enough to remember the Baader-Meinhof gang, and I kept wondering if she were harboring some of the members in her apartment.
As for Eva, well she is completely compelling. Strikingly beautiful and breathtakingly smart she is astonishingly good at her job, and manages to wriggle out of a couple of very difficult situations. Most of the pleasure of this novel is in watching such a smart woman outsmart some pretty smart men. Five stars.
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.
I really enjoyed this book. I love spy novels, and I love anything set in England. This was a really interesting story, bouncing between the past and the present (of the 1970s), and shifting between the stories of the mother, the daughter, and the two of them together. Well-written and compelling.