Restless? Why not settle down with a good book? (Restless - William Boyd)

Member Name: ciunas

Product:	Restless - William Boyd
Date:	15/05/07 (251 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: strong suspenseful narrative

Disadvantages: rather unsatisfying denouement

In ‘Brazzaville Beach’ (1990) Boyd wrote a 1st-person narrative from a woman’s point of view, & the novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In ‘Restless’, his 9th & most recent novel, he employs a parallel narrative structure, & writes from 2 women’s viewpoints.

The book opens with Ruth Gilmartin, a single ESL teacher who lives in Oxford with her young son, visiting her retired widowed mother, Sally Gilmartin, during the long hot summer of 1976 (‘that summer when England reeled, gasping for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat’). Her mother lives in rural Oxfordshire & is acting strangely, nervously scanning the dense woods behind her remote cottage through binoculars, & feigning injury, it seems, in order to take to a wheelchair. As Ruth is leaving Sally hands her what proves to be the first instalment of a manuscript entitled ‘The Story of Eva Delectorskaya’. When she asks who Eva Delectorskaya is her mother replies: ‘I am.’

Eva, we learn, was a beautiful Russian émigrée living in Paris who was recruited as a spy for the British by the dashing, mysterious Lucas Romer in 1939, when she was 29. In each chapter of ‘Restless’ Eva delivers a section of her autobiography to Ruth, so that her account of her career in espionage alternates with her daughter’s narrative, set in the novel’s present, until the 2 timelines converge towards the end. This is a rather clunky structural device — you wonder why Ruth & her mother don’t simply talk more between deliveries — but never mind.

Writing about herself in the 3rd person, Eva tells a compelling tale of multiple identities, codes & passwords, secret assignations, violence, betrayal, pursuit. The covert British campaign of propaganda & misinformation set in America in 1941, intended to persuade them to enter the war, is informative as well as being exciting. In her world, concealment is everything, & nothing is as it seems: motives are veiled, events are difficult to interpret. It is a paradox that those involved with intelligence operations don’t have a good view of reality; as Eva says, ‘We were like miners chipping away at the coalface miles underground — we hadn't a clue about how the mining industry was run on the surface.’

Once a spy, always a spy: you never stop hiding. As we learn the reasons for Eva’s present-day nervousness, Ruth’s side of the story generates further suspense & an atmosphere of menace. Are her uninvited German lodgers linked to the Baader-Meinhof gang? Are the activities of an Iranian student who has a crush on her being monitored by the Shah’s notorious secret police, Savak? Who can she trust? Boyd strews both narrative strands with plenty of red herrings to keep us guessing & maintain an atmosphere of paranoia.

He is particularly adept at characterization, & Eva, Ruth, & many of the supporting cast are vividly brought to life. With Eva, he is interested in exploring the subterfuge-dominated life of someone without a fixed identity — someone who has personas rather than a personality. We deduce that Ruth’s rootlessness & wariness, her self-sufficiency, her inability to finish her PhD thesis & get on with her life, derive from the shifting sand of her mother’s existence. Both mother & daughter are restless.

The book undoubtedly has its weaknesses. Credible ideological motivation is lacking completely, & the denouement isn’t entirely convincing, especially given the verisimilitude of what has gone before. As always with Boyd’s work, however, it is immensely entertaining & enjoyable. Although he is a ‘literary’ novelist he is mainly concerned with constructing a solid narrative & telling a good story. You want to know what happens next. (He also makes you smile occasionally; some of his early novels & screenplays — ‘A Good Man in Africa’, ‘Stars & Bars’, ‘Dutch Girls’ — were laugh-out-loud funny.) ‘Restless’, his first foray into the genre of the spy novel, doesn’t have the textural density of, say, a Greene or Le Carre novel, but Boyd’s lightness of touch, his skill at setting scenes, delineating character & describing action with a few deft sentences, lend his work a marvellous readability

Summary: engrossing spy novel that might appeal even if you don't like spy novels