Restless

Restless by William Boyd is a crackingly good spy story. It's also about the suspicions that all of us have, and those that a good spy can never put behind them. Set in England in the long hot summer of 1976, Ruth is a would-be academic currently teaching English as a foreign language. A single parent, she is haunted by the breakdown of her relationship to Jochen's father, and tends to be suspicious of other peoples' motivations because of this. This makes her sound as though she's paranoid, and she's not, at least not any more than your average person with their average amount of emotional baggage. This aside she's a generally happy confident person, confident in her abilities, her place in society, and who she is - Ruth Gilmartin, the daughter of Sally Gilmartin, who is as English as they come.

But then.....Sally starts to act oddly, appears to have the beginnings of paranoia. Ruth starts to worry about her mother's sanity, and then Sally admits the truth - she is not Sally Gilmartin at all, but Eva Delectorskaya, a half-Russian spy. Reluctantly persuaded to spy for England during the Second World War, Eva has been on the run for the last 30 years from a much bigger spying game, and now they're out to get her......

This is a thrilling read. Boyd sets the backdrop both of 1976, and of the early days of the Second World War brilliantly. Highly atmospheric, this is not a glamorous view of the spy, it is much nearer the Cold War stories of Le Carre. With a completely different take on the uses of the spy, in this case primarily planting false propaganda, it is astonishingly new, and combines the necessary paranoia of the spy, with the paranoia that is potentially in all of us. Part Second World War adventure story, and part classic Cold War spy fiction, this is an intriguing look at the early days of the Cold War spy circuses, an era from which Philby, Burgess and Maclean would surface; and is that rare beast in spy fiction, a novel whose central character is a woman, not just a peripheral honey-trap. If you've never really got into spy fiction this is a great place to start. A 4-paw read.