First published 2006. Bloomsbury, paperback, 2012, pp325, c.115,000 words.
I remember enjoying this when I first read it some ten years ago. Boyd is a writer who I greatly admire and has ranged widely across the genres of contemporary fiction. This is his spy thriller, the spy element mainly taking place between 1939 and 1941 and geographically ranging across Europe and the United States. On top of this is the story of the daughter of the spy who only learns of this about her mother in 1976.
All the spy stuff is very well drawn, with a particularly involving scene where the protagonist is sent to learn field-craft at an old mansion in a wild part of Scotland. Boyd is especially good at evoking time and place: immediate pre-war Paris, London in the Blitz, New York before America was drawn into the war, dusty towns in Texas in the same period, Oxford in the mid-70s. The book is full of these little vignettes. The characters too are well constructed. The main characters of mother and daughter are fully rounded human beings with complicated and sometimes conflicting interiority. None of the minor characters come across as simple caricatures: the shits who are not always shits, the bores who are not always boring, the effete academics who can empathise and be helpful. Boyd is a master at such things.
Read at pace, this is a highly entertaining yarn. But, oh dear. On this re-read the book’s structure is off-putting. The mother’s and daughter’s stories are interleaved which makes the whole thing like a short-episode soap opera with a cliff-hanger at the end of every bite. Getting fully engaged with the place, atmosphere and action of one scene, the book suddenly brakes off and we are required to engage with a quite different scene. To some degree this is to provide the context of the daughter learning about her mother’s past, but to a reader wanting to get buried in a good yarn it keeps breaking the mood and forcing detachment.
The plotting can’t bear close examination. The mother’s recruitment as a spy doesn’t ring true – why should she trust a man who supposedly recruited her brother who was then quickly killed? She is immediately sent to Scotland to learn the field-craft of the spy, but has been recruited to a group who are solely involved in a misinformation campaign. Then suddenly she is put on a field mission where her roll is unclear. Then it’s back to misinformation. The man who recruits her tells her that she is to trust no one, but then she does. The bad guy is clearly signalled early on. There are some rather unbelievable, and one particularly brutal, murders.
Boyd writes superbly as always. I don’t think of him as being a pretentious writer but here there are numerous words never used by speakers of English. ‘Jinked’ (p131, 198 and 235) is just about acceptable as spy terminology, and perhaps period. However, I may be deficient, but I have never used words like ‘crepitations’ (p49), ‘fritter’ used as a collective (p58), ‘refulgent’ (p74), ‘stour’ (p110), ‘farinaceous’ (p115), ‘ochreous’ (p131), ‘albescent’ (p132) and ‘faience’ (p306) in writing or speech. The problem with using such words is that, although they may be in the dictionary and perhaps ‘literary’ authors use them when talking to one another, they cause the ordinary reader to stumble, and perhaps feel inferior that they are not confident in what the word actually really means. If I have to look up a word in the dictionary then the novel writer has failed in their most basic task. The word ’stour’ doesn’t even appear in my Concise Oxford Dictionary or in the on-line Cambridge Dictionary. I just know it as the name of a river in Dorset.
If you are new to Boyd don’t start here. If you usually love his writing read this fast and uncritically. Despite its flaws, there is much to enjoy.
© William John Graham, August 2022