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Summary
Summary
It is Paris, 1939. Twenty-eight year old Eva Delectorskaya is at the funeral of her beloved younger brother. Standing among her family and friends she notices a stranger. Lucas Romer is a patrician looking Englishman with a secretive air and a persuasive manner. He also has a mysterious connection to Kolia, Eva's murdered brother. Romer recruits Eva and soon she is traveling to Scotland to be trained as a spy and work for his underground network. After a successful covert operation in Belgium, she is sent to New York City, where she is involved in manipulating the press in order to shift American public sentiment toward getting involved in WWII.
Three decades on and Eva has buried her dangerous history. She is now Sally Gilmartin, a respectable English widow, living in a picturesque Cotswold village. No one, not even her daughter Ruth, knows her real identity. But once a spy, always a spy. Sally has far too many secrets, and she has no one to trust. Before it is too late, she must confront the demons of her past. This time though she can't do it alone, she needs Ruth's help. Restless is a thrilling espionage novel set during the Second World War and a haunting portrait of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its finest.
Author Notes
William Boyd is a writer who was born in Ghana on March 7, 1952. He was educated at Gordonstoun school; and then the University of Nice, France, the University of Glasgow, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005.
Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. His novels include: A Good Man in Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, and Any Human Heart, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Boyd published Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel in early 2012.
In 2015 his title, Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Clay, Amory made the new Zealand Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Ruth Gilmartin learns the true identity and the WWII profession of her aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, at the start of Boyd's elegant ninth novel (after Any Human Heart), Ruth is understandably surprised. Sally, n?e Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian ?migr? living in Paris in 1939, was recruited as a spy by Lucas Romer, the head of a secretive propaganda group called British Security Coordination, to help get America into the war. This fascinating story is well told, but slightly undercut by Ruth's less-than-dramatic life as a single mother teaching English at Oxford while pursuing a graduate degree in history. Ruth's more pedestrian existence can't really compete with her mother's dramatic revelations. The contemporary narrative achieves a good deal more urgency when Ruth's mother recruits her to hunt down the reclusive, elusive Romer. But the real story is Eva/Sally's, a vividly drawn portrait of a minor figure in spydom caught up in the epic events leading up to WWII. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
If an espionage thriller with terror tentacles reaching from pre-World War II to the present can be called a cozy, this is it. Boyd's latest novel moves back and forth from the heart of the British countryside and misty, romantic Edinburgh to prewar Paris and into various capitals during the conflict itself--all with a satisfying, Agatha Christie atmosphere. This is also a mother-daughter story set in 1976, with the daughter of an eccentric mother trying to figure out who wants to kill her mother, Sally Gilmartin. Boyd introduces a rather clunky literary device of having the mother give her daughter a manuscript that details her life as a WWII spy for the British Secret Service. Boyd's focus on Gilmartin's spy training and her behind-the-scenes propaganda work in New York to steer public opinion toward U.S. involvement in the war is fascinating. A somewhat clumsy narrative enlivened by some expertly generated suspense. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
Two sinister figures haunt the world of the 20th century British Secret Intelligence Service - Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby - both notorious traitors and both Soviet double-agents. Though Philby (Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge) was far and away the more successful spy, Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity, Cambridge) is paradoxically the better known today because his denunciation occurred in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher declared to the House of Commons that he had been the so-called "Fourth Man" in the celebrated Cambridge spy ring - Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Philby and now Blunt. It was a news explosion, and I remember the occasion well, not just because of the endless images of Blunt's lugubrious, saurian features, nor because of his young acolyte and apologist Brian Sewell's wonderfully retro accent as he defended his friend on the TV bulletins - out Mitfording the Mitfords with his "awfs" and "hices" and "gawns" - but because Blunt, at the moment of his tremendous downfall, appeared to be at the very apogee of the British ruling class. We - that's to say the British state - had known for many years that Blunt had been a Soviet double-agent during the war and after. He had been arrested and confessed in 1964 and had been granted full immunity from prosecution as a result of his confession. And yet his climb up the not-very-greasy pole of privilege had continued without hindrance. Blunt, despite being prepared to betray his country to the Russians, was happy to accept a knighthood in 1956, to take up the directorship of the Courtauld Institute and, ultimate of honours, had become Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. It appeared to me then that the moot question was this: just what degree of malfeasance would disbar you from rising to the top of the establishment tree in this country; just how badly did you have to behave before you got into serious trouble? Clearly, betraying your country to its key enemy for many years was no kind of impediment to professional advancement at all, not the slightest barrier to success, honours and acclaim. It's always worth recalling, in the case of the Cambridge Five (the fifth man was John Cairncross), that these men lived in and flourished in a democratic society, each one benefitting from the many privileges accruing to its privately educated elite. They were not impoverished, downtrodden or embittered, nor victims of repression or state corruption, nor thwarted in ambition, blocked at every turn. There were no visible grudges or resentments - so why did they become traitors? Looking back now at the Blunt affair in the late 1970s I think this explains why my most profound emotion was bafflement rather than shock or affront. What kind of a country was Britain where something as patently bizarre as Blunt's effortless promotion could be allowed to take place? What did it say about a nation when self-confessed traitors were allowed so brazenly to flourish and profit? Many years later, as I investigated the life of Philby, possibly our greatest traitor, I thought I had begun to arrive at some answers. I was researching Restless (published in 2006) - a spy novel set in the early 1940s and the 1970s. I had become fascinated by the psychology of being a spy and I came to wonder more and more what it was that the spy surrendered in taking up the profession. What was the price that was paid? The answer, I concluded, was a kind of dehumanisation. To be a successful spy - and to be a successful double-agent or traitor - meant you had to live in a world where there was no trust. Trust was your absolute enemy, the potential cause of your exposure and possible death. But in order for any of us to go about our basic human business - emotional, commercial, amicable, charitable, familial, entrepreneurial - you simply have to trust people. Nothing works, otherwise. It's the default setting. Whether it's the newsagent giving you your change, or your doctor telling you that you don't need another CAT scan, or your husband calling home to say he'll be working late, almost all of the complex traffic of human interrelations assumes this fundamental understanding - trust is the basic currency of our social and personal lives. But the spy voluntarily decides to forswear this; he or she chooses to step aside from this unspoken contract and, so I believe, loses a key component of humanity. But if you trust no one and everyone else is naturally trusting - then you have a huge advantage. Philby, far more than Blunt, exploited this fact. People loved Philby - his wives, his colleagues, his friends (including Graham Greene). Or, to put it another way, they trusted him. When Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia in 1951 Philby's association with them both brought him under suspicion and he was obliged to resign from the secret service. But despite the constant undercurrent of vague misgiving around Philby, no one could believe anything fundamentally bad about him or seemed keen to take it further. Kim was "one of us", a "decent chap" who'd "stood loyally by a friend". He'd been awarded the OBE for his war service, for heaven's sake. Harold Macmillan, then foreign secretary, exonerated Philby in Parliament in 1955, stating: "I have no reason to believe that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country." Philby was at the summit of his success as far as his Soviet controllers were concerned, having passed on immensely valuable secrets about the US's atomic arsenal during his sojourn as first secretary at the British embassy in Washington DC in the late 1940s and early 50s. The Russians regarded Philby as a "super-spy". It's impossible to imagine what his thoughts must have been as he heard Macmillan's confident encomium. And indeed, after a few years in the wilderness of low-paid newspaper and magazine work, he was re-employed by the secret service and he worked under the cover of being a journalist - as a correspondent for the Economist and the Observer - in Beirut. It was only the threat posed by a new Soviet defector who was on the point of revealing the mole at the heart of our secret service that prompted Philby's own defection in 1963. And when the truth about him was revealed the shockwaves were devastating. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian, who had been a close friend and colleague of Philby, found it almost impossible to countenance that he had been a Soviet double-agent for more than two decades - it shook his faith in his own judgment and acuity to its foundations. How could he - how could we all - have been so easily duped? In creating my own Soviet double-agent in Restless I drew on both Philby and Blunt. I imagined someone with Philby's charm and easy charisma but someone who hadn't had to defect and had gone on, like Blunt, to receive all the laurels, status and privilege that a grateful nation could bestow. If Philby hadn't defected, or if he hadn't been subject to the threat of exposure, then it's entirely possible to imagine a life for him in England where he would have enjoyed all the social acclaim available. A solid pension, good connections, membership of the right clubs, a contented, featherbedded old age. One of the attractions about writing fiction that brushes up against reportage, documented facts and history is that you have the licence to explore theories, contentions and hypotheses that more cautious scholars, journalists or biographers would eschew for sound professional reasons. I could invent a parallel universe in which a Philby-figure was never exposed and thrived in a Blunt manner. However, the great bonus for me as a novelist was to stumble across an account of what the British secret service had been up to in the US in 1940 and 41. The campaign that was mounted in the States - under the bland name British Security Co-ordination - was a massive, organised, covert attempt to sway American public opinion into joining the war in Europe. This operation was set in motion by Churchill himself when he became prime minister in May 1940. He saw it as his absolute, crucial objective to encourage America to join the fight against Nazi Germany but was quickly aware there was no enthusiasm for the conflict across the Atlantic - 80% of Americans were anti-intervention, staunch isolationists, exemplified by the fact that the popular, anti-British movement America First had more than a million signed-up members. But in June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against Stalin's Russia, the British suddenly had a new, contentious ally. Even towards the end of 1941, as German armies faltered before Moscow, it became apparent that the Soviet Union would not be defeated - indeed, the USSR's apparently inexhaustible manpower might be the one factor that would bring about the demise of Hitler's expansionist dreams. Shrewd minds in NKVD headquarters in Lubyanka Square began imagining a postwar world - and the last thing the Russians wanted were huge American armies in a pacified, Nazi-free Europe. And so I placed my British double-agent - my Philby/Blunt character - in America in 1941, charged by his superiors with the task of discrediting and exposing all of Churchill's so-called "dirty-tricks" that were meant to hoodwink the American population and thereby undermine the isolationist cause. In my version it turns out to be a highly complicated game of double and triple-bluff and one that is ultimately negated - as were British Security Co-ordination's clever manipulations - by the total surprise of Pearl Harbor. As my Russian double-agent says from the vantage point of the 1970s, the Japanese "rather fucked everything up". There were Soviet agents in the US in the early 40s. The NKVD successfully eliminated a highly placed and influential Russian defector - Walter Krivitsky - in Washington DC, brilliantly feigning his suicide before he could deliver all of his secrets to the British and Americans, so my fiction doesn't stray too far from what we already know. But what is fiction when one is confronted with the extraordinary career of a Kim Philby? The postwar revelations of the Soviet penetration of the British secret service by the Cambridge spies cast a long, baleful shadow - not least over our novelists and screenwriters. That Philby, Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Cairncross - these highly privileged, well-educated men - should be double-agents and traitors seemed inconceivable and impossible, and to a significant degree their betrayal still exercises our creative imaginations 50 years or more on. But that, paradoxically, may be the one byproduct of their nefarious lives we can be grateful for. William Boyd's two-part adaptation of his novel Restless is on BBC1 on 27 and 28 December. - William Boyd Caption: Captions: Hayley Atwell in the BBC production of William Boyd's Restless Two sinister figures haunt the world of the 20th century British Secret Intelligence Service - Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby - both notorious traitors and both Soviet double-agents. Though Philby (Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge) was far and away the more successful spy, Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity, Cambridge) is paradoxically the better known today because his denunciation occurred in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher declared to the House of Commons that he had been the so-called "Fourth Man" in the celebrated Cambridge spy ring - Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Philby and now Blunt. It was a news explosion, and I remember the occasion well, not just because of the endless images of Blunt's lugubrious, saurian features, nor because of his young acolyte and apologist Brian Sewell's wonderfully retro accent as he defended his friend on the TV bulletins - out Mitfording the Mitfords with his "awfs" and "hices" and "gawns" - but because Blunt, at the moment of his tremendous downfall, appeared to be at the very apogee of the British ruling class. If you trust no one and everyone else is naturally trusting - then you have a huge advantage. Philby, far more than Blunt, exploited this fact. People loved Philby - his wives, his colleagues, his friends (including Graham Greene). Or, to put it another way, they trusted him. When Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia in 1951 Philby's association with them both brought him under suspicion and he was obliged to resign from the secret service. But despite the constant undercurrent of vague misgiving around Philby, no one could believe anything fundamentally bad about him or seemed keen to take it further. Kim was "one of us", a "decent chap" who'd "stood loyally by a friend". He'd been awarded the OBE for his war service, for heaven's sake. Harold Macmillan, then foreign secretary, exonerated Philby in Parliament in 1955, stating: "I have no reason to believe that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country." Philby was at the summit of his success as far as his Soviet controllers were concerned, having passed on immensely valuable secrets about the US's atomic arsenal during his sojourn as first secretary at the British embassy in Washington DC in the late 1940s and early 50s. The Russians regarded Philby as a "super-spy". It's impossible to imagine what his thoughts must have been as he heard Macmillan's confident encomium. In creating my own Soviet double-agent in Restless I drew on both Philby and Blunt. I imagined someone with Philby's charm and easy charisma but someone who hadn't had to defect and had gone on, like Blunt, to receive all the laurels, status and privilege that a grateful nation could bestow. If Philby hadn't defected, or if he hadn't been subject to the threat of exposure, then it's entirely possible to imagine a life for him in England where he would have enjoyed all the social acclaim available. A solid pension, good connections, membership of the right clubs, a contented, featherbedded old age. - William Boyd.
Kirkus Review
Atmospheric novel about an older woman whose past career as a WWII spy has come back to haunt her. Ruth Gilmartin is a single mother of one in 1976 England. On a visit to Grandma's, Ruth's mother, Sally, informs her that her real name is Eva Delectorskaya, and that she was an agent of British Intelligence during World War II. Eva hands Sally a manuscript of her story, abruptly launching the duo and the reader into the past. Boyd (Any Human Heart, 2003, etc.) seems more eager to tell Eva's story than Ruth's. Not surprisingly, as the elder Gilmartin finds herself swept into a world on the brink of war in 1939. Recruited by the swarthy and mysterious Lucas Romer, Eva is trained in spycraft and joins Romer's team, specializing in disinformation. Propaganda is Eva's stock in trade, and she has a knack for it. Still, for all her talent, she finds herself attracted to her secretive boss. Boyd has obviously read a few espionage novels. Can any young woman resist James Bond? Ruth leads a far less glamorous life. Saddled with Jochen, her inquisitive son, she teaches English as a Second Language. Her adventures occur vicariously, through the lives of the foreign students who study with her. With a nod to irony, Ruth teaches people to blend into their surroundings. At first, her mother's revelation seems to be a sign of senility. As Ruth begins to investigate, the shadows of her mother's former life reveal themselves. There is some truth to this work of fiction, and the real-life events make for a fascinating backdrop. Boyd skillfully manipulates language as easily as Eva does. He handles the plot more roughly. Ruth is clumsy albeit untrained, and the other characters in her world are rather thinly sketched. Yet Boyd fits the puzzle together neatly in the end. A bit light on action and intrigue, but a cool, collected effort. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In his latest novel, Boyd (A Good Man in Africa) entwines two stories. One, set in England in 1976, focuses on the everyday preoccupations of Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother who teaches English to foreigners in Oxford. Ruth's life changes when her mother, Sally, begins to reveal her past to her daughter. In the early years of World War II, Sally, whose real name is Eva Delectorskaya, was recruited as a spy by British intelligence. Sent to New York in 1941, she spread black propaganda in an attempt to coax the United States into the war. On a mission in New Mexico, Eva was betrayed and had to kill a man to survive. Unable to trust her team, she escaped to Canada and eventually returned to England, where she lives in seclusion under a new identity, waiting for her betrayer to track her down. While some readers may be annoyed by the author's stylistic tics, particularly the profusion of paired adverbs (e.g., people speak "seriously, weightily" and shrug "hopelessly, helplessly"), others will enjoy this glimpse of wartime dirty tricks. For larger public libraries.-Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.