Spies in Oxford

Spy fiction, or ‘spy-fi’, has its specialist practitioners, but big literary names have also turned to the genre for their own varied purposes. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American springs to mind, as does Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, a fictionalised study of the CIA. But where these two literary spy thrillers struggle to shed the suspicion of political motivation, William Boyd’s Restless instead does what all his novels do. It informs us a little about what humans are like.

In the sweltering English summer of 1976, Sally Gilmartin gives her daughter a manuscript describing her secret past life as Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée and British spy during the first few years of the second world war. This manuscript forms half of the novel, with the other half telling, in alternating chapters, the story of Ruth’s life in Oxford as an academic coming to terms with her mother’s history. The stories dovetail seamlessly towards the end, thanks to Boyd’s narrative control.