I needed a quick read for a flight and came across William Boyd’s spy novel “Restless,” which did the trick and more. It’s an absorbing thriller about an aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, who thinks her life is in danger and reveals in a series of written accounts to her daughter, Ruth, of her clandestine past — born Eva Delectorskaya, a half-Russian, half-English émigré recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939. Ruth, a single mom and graduate student, thinks at first her mother is going crazy, but is drawn into her account as details of “Eva’s” life emerge.
The story unfolds with chapters alternating between her mother’s life as a spy in 1940-1941 and Ruth’s life in Oxford in 1976, procrastinating her thesis and earning a living teaching English as a second language. Undoubtedly, the chapters of Eva and her work under boss Lucas Romer are more suspenseful, but Ruth’s life also contains a couple of mysterious characters (dubious house guests Ludger and Ilse from Germany and an Iranian suitor Hamid) that keep things up in the air.
Boyd has cleverly based the novel on the history of a covert propaganda group called the British Security Coordination, whose aim was to change the minds of isolationist Americans and lure the U.S. into World War II. In the book, Eva’s work, as part of the secret unit under Romer, includes “feeding clever false information out into the world” through the medium of a small press agency and couriering a forged map of Hitler’s South American ambitions to bait the U.S. into action.
But after a couple missions go badly, Eva realizes someone in her unit has betrayed her and she flees, using her spy training to live life on the run. The BSC unit is rolled up after Pearl Harbor, and Eva (now Sally Gilmartin) marries, keeping her former life hidden.
Thirty-five years later, Sally, still on the lookout for someone who might bring her down, decides to try to put an end to her life undercover by writing her account of the BSC and getting her daughter to track down her former boss.
The 2006 novel, one of the first on the BSC, makes for a snappy, interesting read, conjuring a time in the run-up to WWII when Britain had a secret agency of news manipulation and black propaganda operating right out of N.Y.’s Rockefeller Center.
For more on this hardly heard of agency and the role of British agents in the U.S. before Pearl Harbor, read Boyd’s fascinating article in the Guardian.
