Restless
William Boyd Bloomsbury, 325pp, £17.99
ISBN 0747585717
William Boyd is much concerned with the artifice of a certain kind of patrician Britishness. Having explored the idea in his last novel, Any Human Heart, the somewhat laboured fictional biography of his invented dilettante and spy, Logan Mountstuart, he has another, brisker and more enjoyable crack at it here.
Restless is set in Oxfordshire in the long hot summer of 1976. Ruth Gilmartin is visiting her mother in her little Cotswold stone cottage, along with her son, Jochen. Her mother, Sally, has long been eccentric and unpredictable, but on this visit she seems not to be herself at all. Ruth fears she is becoming senile, is losing her identity a little, but in fact she is about to reveal to Ruth that her identity has been an illusion all along. During Ruth's visit, Sally presents her with a folder of carefully typewritten pages. The story the pages tell is that of a Russian spy who worked for British intelligence during the war, one Eva Delectorskaya. It is also the story of Sally Gilmartin's life.
Sally takes her daughter through her memoir as a way of explaining that she has never been who she seems. Fearing for her life after the war, she was forced to adopt a new identity, go to ground, a fact she did not disclose to her late husband - or her daughter, until now. Boyd's novel intercuts portions of this memoir with an account of Ruth's life in Oxford, and seeks to show how the subversions of the past are visited on future generations.
His evocation of the chaos of Europe and the apocalyptic fears of Britain in the very early 1940s is expertly done. Sally writes of her former life with the full acuity of a novelist. Her story is told in the third person, as if the events it describes happened to someone else entirely, and in a real sense we are persuaded that they did. Eva was recruited to be a spy after the death of her beloved brother working for the Resistance in Paris, and she was trained in the arts of deception by her charismatic mentor and eventual lover, the very British Lucas Romer; Romer took her on covert operations in the United States as part of a propaganda cell to tempt America into the war, and eventually sent her on a mission impossible in Mexico, where she was set up to kill or be killed.
Sally has spent a lifetime trying to understand Eva's betrayal by Romer, and Boyd takes a novel to tease out an explanation. Along the way he shows how one deception always leads to another so that, in the end, there is nothing left to trust. The crumbling of Ruth's knowledge of her mother - and if you do not know your mother, who do you know? - makes everything around her seem false and unstable. Karl-Heinz Kleist, the father of her son, a man she met in Germany while a student, has left her to bring up Jochen on her own; Kleist's brother, who boasts about having made porn films and having been an associate of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, has pitched up to stay at her house for a few nights and she is not sure whether to welcome him or shop him to the authorities.
To make ends meet while she completes a thesis on German revolutionaries after the First World War, Ruth teaches English to foreign students. One of them, Hamid, an Iranian en gineer, seems to have fallen in love with her. She worries, however, about the sincerity of his affection, is concerned about him organising protests against the shah, and, when she even tually kisses him, she immediately recoils to ask him whether he is an agent of Savak, the Iranian anti-revolutionary security service. "Hamid closed his eyes," Boyd writes, "and keeping them closed, said: 'My brother was killed by Savak'." The symmetry seems too perfect. What is she, and what are we, to believe?
This is all well-turned le Carré territory, and at times Restless appears to be written in homage to the master. Boyd's prose can plod a little, and occasionally he seems more concerned with writing Literature than with keeping the false starts and second guesses of the genre in focus. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Eva Delectorskaya is a far more compelling figure - dodging spooks and flirting with the enemy - than either Sally Gilmartin or her daughter, and her distant memoir, as a result, is much more alive than the Oxfordshire in which it is framed. The relationship between mother and daughter never quite has the pressure of authenticity, though perhaps that is part of Boyd's point.
The two time-frames of the book, the war years and the 1970s, are intended to be in balance, before Boyd skilfully ties them together at the end. It is a testament to his curiosity and research into covert operations in America before Pearl Harbor that the account of Eva's spying years is far more spirited than her plans for revenge 30 years on. This gives the book an uneven kind of interest, but a genuine one. There are structural echoes in it of the curious tale of Melita Norwood, "the spy who came in from the garden" (as the papers christened her when she was unmasked at the age of 87), but, as in her case, the past seems an awful lot more vivid than the present.
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