Books & Poetry

William Boyd’s first novel since leaving Penguin for Bloomsbury isn’t his most daring or original – it isn’t ‘The New Confessions’ or ‘A Good Man In Africa’ – but it is heart-stoppingly exciting. Far too exciting, evidently, to warrant a place on the Booker longlist. Eva Delectorskaya is a Russian emigré living in Paris just before the outbreak of World War II. After her brother is killed she is recruited – as she learns he was – into the British Secret Service by one Lucas Romer, and packed off to a mansion in Scotland to be trained in spycraft and have her personality rewired so that she becomes aloof, independent and permanently suspicious.

Stints in Belgium and London working for fake news agencies culminate in a secondment to the US a matter of months before Pearl Harbour as part of a covert campaign to persuade Americans of the need to be involved in the European war. She’s a good spy, but she has two fatal flaws: her love for the mysterious Romer, and a ‘scrupulous resourcefulness’ that makes her actions in the field strangely predictable.

Running parallel to all this is the story of Eva’s daughter, chaotic single mother Ruth, who teaches English to foreign students and knows nothing of her mother’s wartime activities. As far as she’s concerned, ‘Sally Gilmartin’ (Eva’s post-war identity) is a wilful widower with a passion for gardening and a quaint cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside. So it’s a surprise when, one day in the hot summer of 1976, ‘Sally’ tells Ruth of her fears that someone is trying to kill her, handing her, by way of explanation, the first part of a manuscript entitled ‘The Story of Eva Delectorskaya’.

Boyd explains away the tonal similarity between the two narratives by implying that the ‘Eva’ sections have been rewritten by Ruth. It’s a device that works fine here, though it might not in a more literary novel where the pressure to ventriloquise Eva would be greater, even if the result was detrimental to the overall effect. And that’s the rub: what makes ‘Restless’ great is its indifference to literariness, and how content it is to be simply (simply!) a riveting tale of wartime derring-do which suggests Sebastian Faulks’s flaccid ‘Charlotte Gray’ souped up by John Le Carré.