William Boyd
RESTLESS
328pp. Bloomsbury. £17.99.
0 7475 8571 7
The spy thriller is a kind of weather report, taking disparate, shifting phenomena and working them into a prognosis for the days to come. Where the casual observer only sees the wavering breeze of foreign policy, approaching clouds of war, or sunny patches of treaties, the spy thriller knows of the coming of the storm, which may be why its most productive period coincided with the period we call the Cold War. Since that time, the form has co-existed rather uneasily with the present day, as if a kind of geopolitical global warming affects its ability to say anything other than the fact that things look very bleak indeed.
The response to this problem has taken the spy thriller in two opposed directions. John le Carré, the master of the Cold War novel, has tackled the situation head-on, directing his steely gaze towards multinational corporations and neoconservative cabals. The other approach, best exemplified by the novels of Alan Furst, has been to turn the clock back and convert a form obsessed with interpreting present and future into a historical receptacle, leaving it to us to decide if the double-crosses of the 1930s have any resonance in our world.
William Boyd’s latest novel, Restless, chooses the latter approach, its parallel stories focusing on the Second World War and the 1970s. The novel is narrated by Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother living in Oxford, who finds out in the summer of 1976 that her mother, Sally, is really a Russian émigrée called Eva Delectorskaya. This doubling of what seems to be a solid, stable English identity kicks off the novel, with Eva’s recruitment and work for British Intelligence told in chapters that alternate with Ruth’s account of her life in Oxford.
The chapters dealing with Eva’s past are ostensibly given by her to Ruth in instalments. Ruth reads a chapter, describes her present situation and then picks up another chapter until the stories begin to converge, which is a neat way of emphasizing the reader’s gradual entanglement in a fictional world. There is the question of why Eva’s account is in the third person, and why her narration is so accomplished in terms of pacing, characterization and atmosphere. The same is true for its generic self-consciousness. Eva’s story moves along a conventional arc – recruitment, training, initial assignment, triumph and betrayal. Her unit, operating on the fringes of British Intelligence, uses its “own vocabulary, different from that employed by the service at large”, although the specialized vocabulary never quite achieves the convincing ring of the words used in le Carré’s Circus.
But to complain that Eva’s story is too story-like is to be closed to its pleasures, to fail to appreciate the deft evocation of Europe on the edge of Armageddon, London during the Blitz, and the United States before it entered the war. Under the charismatic leadership of Lucas Rohmer, Eva’s unit moves to New York to spread misinformation that might force America into the war on the Allied side. When she heads to New Mexico to plant a fake Nazi map, her story becomes especially compelling, giving us a journey with shadowers, dead ends and a corpse, the tautness of the plot not excluding an immersion in the atmospheric details:
She chose the diner and ordered a hamburger. The place was empty: two grey-haired ladies manned the soda fountain and an Indian with a sternly handsome, melancholic face swept the floor. Eva ate her burger and drank her Coca-Cola. She experienced a form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian’s broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time.
It is easy to see a nostalgist’s vision of a long-lost world in such a description, and in this the book is reminiscent of Boyd’s previous novel, Any Human Heart (2003), which provided similar scenic evocations of the twentieth century. Restless seems to have a direct relation to much of the material in that novel, which also had its Second World War spy story, with conspiracies directed by men in power; while its depiction of the 1970s as a whirlpool of counterculture and activists of the Baader-Meinhof Group shows up in the current book too. Ruth’s account, when not dealing with her Russian mother, involves an ultra-Left West German guest who brings the police in his wake.
But the period atmosphere, though skilfully rendered, is only half of the novel. The other half, to do with character, feels thinner. Eva is compelling enough when she is acting as a spy, but she is less satisfying if we ask who she is as a person. Her Russian background contributes nothing to her character, apart from an atmospheric touch or two and some odd thrills. As for her recruitment into British Intelligence, this turns on the development of plot rather than on any fulcrum of belief or faith, a lack that seems to show a very current ennui seeping back into this representation of the past.
Towards the end, facing the question of belief or ideology in relation to a character loosely modelled on one (or all) of the Cambridge Four, the best the novel can do is suggest innate perversity as a motive:
He’d got it all: everything that seems most desirable – money, reputation, esteem, class, style – the title. He was a “Lord”, for God’s sake. He was laughing all the time. All the time, laughing at them all.
This seems a remarkably naive and somewhat forced pronouncement, one that draws attention to the way Boyd’s characters move through the 1940s without ever being touched by beliefs like capitalism, Fascism, or Communism. The spy thriller has often insisted that the realm of espionage is a world within a world, played according to rules that have little to do with larger ideologies, and driven by the intimate, constricting relationships that have been forged by its denizens. But William Boyd’s novel, in its very insistence on showing, through Eva and Ruth, how the secret life touches on commonplace existence, falls short of quite penetrating either. Restless takes its storytelling duties seriously, presenting us with a struggle that is often as captivating as a good game of chess. If it still feels inconsequential, one can’t help wondering if that says more about the present than it does about the past.
