Restless (novel)

Infobox Book |
name = Restless


image_caption =
author = William Boyd
country = United States
language = English
genre = Spy novel
pub_date = 2006
publisher = Bloomsbury USA
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 1596912367

"Restless", an espionage novel by William Boyd, was published in 2006 and won the Costa Prize for fiction. It is the story of a mother revealing to her daughter, in a series of written accounts, that she is not all that she seems to be. She is not Sally Gilmartin, as widely supposed, but Eva Delectorskaya, a half-Russian/half-English émigré co-opted after her brother Kolia's murder at an Action Francaise meeting, by Lucas Romer, working on behalf of the British secret services, in the run-up to the Second World War.

During his research for "Any Human Heart", Boyd was interested in the "psychology of spying" and the motivations of Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and Donald Duart Maclean in particular. Sally Gilmartin is a small cog in the machine that flourished before Pearl Harbor with the specific intent of luring the Americans to join the Second World War. This consisted of planting fake maps and spinning anti-German stories in foreign newspapers - dirty tricks and media manipulation. [cite news |publisher= "The Daily Telegraph" |date= 2006-09-03 |title= A writer's life: William Boyd |url= http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/09/03/boboyd.xml |author= Toby Clements |accessdate= 2007-05-23]

According to the author, it is one of the first novels to deal with the British Security Coordination service in New York. The book gained general public interest when it was chosen for inclusion in 'Book Club 2007', on the UK television show Richard & Judy, and the commercial success of the novel is evident in its inclusion on numerous 'best-seller' lists throughout the world.

Plot summary

Ruth is a single mother and graduate student at Oxford during the heatwave of 1976. Her mother, a village eccentric prone to cutting the lawn with garden shears, has revealed that her real name is not Sally Gilmartin but Eva Delectorskaya. This sudden revelation sparks off a cycle of remembrance and recrimination.

This is predominantly a spy story, and Eva's tale of wartime espionage, which runs parallel to the account of Ruth's discovery, is beautifully wrought. We learn how Eva becomes part of a team working for AAS Ltd, a press agency set up by Lucas Romer in Belgium to provide misinformation against the Nazis. Following the "Abwehr" invasion, she and her team are then sent to sow pro-war propaganda in the rabidly isolationist US - still mindful of its high death toll in World War I ("life's good here... why mess it up going to war 3,000 miles away")- in an attempt to cajole, bully and blackmail the country into entering the second world war. Working for the Transoceanic Agency, she falls for her mentor and boss, Lucas Romer. Eva, in order to get the BSC closer to President Roosevelt, is asked by her lover to have a one-night stand with Mason Harding, press secretary to Roosevelt adviser Harry Hopkins, so that he can be blackmailed with compromising photographs. But all is not as it seems: what follows is an attempt to assassinate Eva on her Las Cruces mission in New Mexico (by a Mexican detective called Luis de Baca), and the subsequent rolling up of AAS Ltd. When Eva warns her colleague Morris Devereux of her suspicions that an insider set her up at Las Cruces, Devereux seems to know who that insider is, but mysteriously "commits suicide" before he can tell her more.

Parallel to Eva/Sally's story is that of her daughter Ruth's. Having obtained a first in History at Oxford, she is attempting to write her thesis on the 1920s period in Germany under the supervision of the rather lazy but very affable Robert York MA (Oxon). However, Ruth has become sucked into the post-graduate trap of teaching EFL to foreign students in Oxford. As her mother gives her the account of her life as a spy in its piecemeal format, Ruth and her young son, Jochen, are caught up in the Baader-Meinhoff affair when Ludger, the brother of her ex-German lover and married, and his girlfriend camp out in her flat. She also has to fend off the amorous approaches of Hamid, her Iranian engineering student, who falls deeply and hopelessly in love with her. Her life becomes even more topsy turvy when her mother asks her to re-establish contact with Romer, now the 73-year-old Lord Mansfield and a successful publishing magnate, by posing as a journalist from the "The Telegraph". The meeting is a tense one as he drops his initial friendliness towards Ruth at their meeting in Brydges, his gentleman's club:

Like so many of Boyd's heroes, Eva is only a minor cog caught up in the vast engine of history. The question is whether she can possibly survive being pulverized by the vast political machinations being enacted around her. In "Restless", spying is at the very core of Eva's being. As we read about her world of quadruple bluffs, of forgotten passwords, and gestures caught in reflections, we see Eva transforming herself from the flesh and blood of a normal civilian into an all-suspecting spy, unable to let any doubt slip by unprobed. It leaves her in the exhaustingly agitated state suggested by the book's title.

Boyd hints at something deeper in his novel than the traditional moral scepticism engendered by most spy tales. He probes the humanity lurking beneath the surface of any duplicity, and asks how Eva can attempt to live a normal life in which the repose offered by trust is withheld. And in the fearless yet anxious character of Eva - constantly retracing her steps, checking her snares, never knowing when she might be "disappeared" - he depicts the restless mortality in us all. [cite news |publisher= "Financial Times" |date= 2006-09-23 |title= FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE - BOOK REVIEWS: Fiction - The heat of exposure |url= http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=William+Boyd&y=8&aje=true&x=17&id=060923001272 |author= George Pendle |accessdate= 2007-05-23 ] The novel's atmosphere of intrigue may also well be a function of the style of prose as he book continually switches between time periods and, in doing so, from first to third person.

However, the plot's structure does raise some questions. Why does Eva's intimate lover send her to her death simply as a result of his political allegiance? And why, after so many years have passed, does Eva/Sally finally choose to extract revenge on a ghost, when her life would have been much more comfortable if she had done this immediately after the War? Also, only a page and a half is devoted to an explanation of the ghost's treachery to his country. Eva gives the simple (and rather weak) explanation that maybe it is sometimes more natural to hate her England as it is to love it, but this doesn't nearly go far enough to explain the duplicities of such a complex character as Romer.

Footnotes

References

"Restless", William Boyd, Bloomsbury, 2006, ISBN 978-0-7475-8620-3

External links

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