Restless by William Boyd
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] face it, everything you thought you knew about your mother was a cleverly constructed fantasy. I felt suddenly alone, in the dark, lost: what does one do in a situation like this?"

A blurb on the cover promises "Boyd has written a crackling spy thriller" (New York Times Book Review), which made me reluctant to read the novel. "Crackling thrillers" usually contain not much more than the plot - not enough of a reason to read a book. Yet I know William Boyd's work from Brazzaville Beach that I reviewed here and rated with the extremely rare five-star mark so finally I decided to give the book a try. And I am pleased to report that the novel is a little more than a thriller, certainly not "crackling", well, maybe, toward the end it is crackling a little. A pity!

The year is 1976, London. The narrator, Ruth Gilmartin, a young single mother working on her PhD and teaching English as a second language, visits her mother, Sally, in her cottage in Oxfordshire. Sally is in a wheelchair, although she appears to be able to walk fine, and her behavior seems a bit strange. Ruth begins to worry about her mother's mental state, but then Sally gives her a folder with a story to read - The Story of Eva Delectorskaya, and tells Ruth that she is actually that Eva, the subject of the story.

The novel alternates between two threads: the "current" one that is happening in 1976 Great Britain, and the story of Eva D. that begins in 1939 Paris and continues through the war years on two continents. Eva is half-Russian and her family emigrated from Russia in 1917, after the October Revolution. Eva's brother died in intelligence service for the British government and his boss recruits Eva to continue her brother's work.

The 1976 thread is well-written, unlike most crackling thrillers, and I find the characters vivid and believable. I have problems, though, with the other thread: not only do the characters seem less realistic, but first and foremost there is no feeling of the war, the Second World War, going on in the background of the events in the plot. The events could as well be happening in the 1950s or 1960s.

Readers who love thrillers will be excited by the passages about events happening in Las Cruces, New Mexico, late in the story. Not only do the events move fast, but their logic seems to be quite believable to the extent that this reader, not a thriller fan, got quite captivated by the action.

References to disinformation business may be amusing as they are particularly relevant to today's world. We read about "feeding careful and clever false information out into the world" and we learn about the mechanics of such fake news factories. Disinformation was a big business even before Facebook or other "social media".

Considering my limited abilities of expression in written English it is arrogant to criticize Mr. Boyd's prose, which, in general, is high quality. Yet there is one passage in the novel where the author clumsily uses three awkward adverbs - "unthinkingly", "unreflectingly", and "knowingly" - virtually next to each other. Overall, though, I have found Restless a good read.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

View all my reviews