Spies, lies and family ties

William Boyd's Restless, a tale of wartime espionage, is as acute as it is ambitious, says Helen Dunmore
Restless by William Boyd

by William Boyd
328pp, Bloomsbury, £17.99

Spies fascinate the public imagination in the same way that actors do, possibly because to pretend to be other than what we are is one of the deepest and most seductive human impulses. Like actors, spies must perform a self; must convince in the role and yet remain detached enough to step out of it into what might be called real life. The greatest complexities develop when the performed self of the spy has to be carried on into his or her most intimate relationships. So, when two spies fall in love - or appear to fall in love - as they do in William Boyd's new novel, the story becomes a hall of mirrors in which everybody is deceiving everybody else. Or perhaps, the deception itself is only an appearance ...

The action of Restless takes place before and during the second world war, and in the summer of 1976. Eva Delectorskaya, a beautiful young woman who is Russian by birth, is recruited in France by Lucas Romer after the murder of her brother, Kolia. It appears that Kolia has been working for Romer, and through him for the British secret service. Eva is trained as war begins, and becomes part of Romer's department. This growing concern, known as AAS Ltd, creates and plants news stories with the aim of bringing the United States into the war. The dramatic heart of the novel concerns a scheme to plant maps that contain misinformation about Nazi intentions in Latin America. Eva, now based in New York, has formed a sexual relationship with Romer. As spymaster, he has taught her much of her craft and knows the cut of her mind as well as he knows her body.

This story is by no means delivered straight. Boyd creates a wonderful appearance of candour in a narrative that is actually packed with twists and double meanings. Eva writes her own account of her career as a spy many years later and gives it to her daughter, Ruth, in a succession of buff folders. Ruth, who has always known her mother as an Englishwoman named Sally Gilmartin, realises that everything she has ever been told of her mother's past is fiction. The content of the folders destroys the past, modifies the present and will perhaps control the future.

Gradually, Ruth sees that the omissions from her mother's story are as disturbing as what she includes, as is the fact that the account appears carefully shaped to achieve an end that Ruth cannot yet begin to imagine. Meanwhile, Ruth herself is on the fringes of 1970s political activism. Friends of friends of the Baader-Meinhof gang haunt her house, while her work as a teacher of English brings her into contact with opponents of the Shah of Iran's regime - or, at least, with people who claim to be its opponents. Policemen photograph demonstrators and try to recruit informers; political ferment in "a far-off country of which we know little" is coming home to roost once again. Ruth has some of her mother's detachment and force, some of her beauty, but none of the brutal experience that made Eva who she was. In fact, Ruth can break rules because she possesses a fundamental sense of safety which her mother, like other refugees, can only note and perhaps envy.

Deception has sat at the heart of Ruth Gilmartin's life since her birth, and the consequences of this are not fully explored. Boyd's last novel, Any Human Heart, dealt with the question of how a man tells himself the story of his own life, in something close to privacy. In Restless , the storytelling becomes an act that has to be inspected - and mistrusted - from every angle. Why is this person telling me this particular story, and how can I avoid falling into the trap of hearing only what he or she intends me to hear? Boyd very successfully draws the reader into a tactical unfolding of clues that can be taken straight, or as a double-blind, or even a double-double-blind. The plot is gripping, and he creates characters who are spies in every fibre of their being, creatures of dangerous times and a soul-destroying profession. The intriguing, shifting subject matter is set off by a narrative style which in some ways recalls Georges Simenon's lucid, earthy, laconic unpacking of criminal mysteries. Like Simenon, Boyd registers the sensuous texture of life very precisely and without any decorative flourish. The monotony of hot days, the moment when drinking slides into drunkenness, the threshing of trees in an August wind or the taking of meals in provincial cafes are exactly what they are, and as such memorable.

Restless is enormously readable in every respect: a confident, intelligent, ambitious novel about the "bitter, dark current that flowed beneath the placid surface of [Eva's] ordinary life". This dark current is the Styx as much as it is the threat from Eva's past. For almost 30 years she has feared that someone is going to come and kill her, but as her daughter discovers by the end of the book, "you don't need to have been a spy ... to feel like this". One day someone is indeed going to come and take Eva away, just as someone is going to come for each and every character in the novel. No amount of vigilance or plain-code or setting up of safe houses can prevent it, since the outwitting of death is beyond even the more abstruse branches of the British secret service.

· Helen Dunmore's latest novel is House of Orphans (Penguin)

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