Restless by William Boyd

William Boyd is a well-established writer who has been writing decent contemporary fiction for over 20 years. Some of his stories have made it to the big screen eg A Good Man in Africa and Stars and Bars. In some cases he’s even written the screenplays for the big screen.

I’ve been a fan of William Boyd’s since reading the New Confessions bases on the Rousseau book of the same name and it was with some expectation that I sat down to read Restless his latest prize-winning effort. Although he was pipped at the post for overall book of the year by Stef Penney, Restless is a very deserving winner of the prize for best novel of the year.

Restless tells the story of Eva Delectorskaya a beautiful Russian émigré living in Paris at the start of World War II. She is recruited for the British Secret Service by the mysterious Lucas Romer. Under his patronage she is trained to become the perfect spy. In the background of this wartime tale we are brought up to date, well to the long, hot, summer of 1976, where Ruth Gilmartin is visiting her mother, Sal, in her cottage in the sleepy, Oxfordshire village of Middle Ashton. Little does she know that her mother has a mysterious past.

Sal has been writing her memoirs and decides to tell her daughter the truth of her past. Obviously, this is difficult for Ruth to take in but she does believe it and whilst reading about her mother’s adventures founds out something about herself.

The tales of Eva’s spy training and exploits during the war are very well written and believable. For the most part Eva’s job was to obfuscate the media with fictitious stories and make the enemies and allies of Britain move in certain ways. In the beginning, she works in Brussels, then is moved to New York. It is while working form New York, she works out that things aren’t all they seem with the organisation she works for and she makes a deliberate decision to get out when one of her missions goes badly wrong and one of her colleagues ‘kills himself’.

It isn’t until we get back up to date and finish reading her memoir we work out what has gone on in the last chapters of the book which have a somewhat melancholic feel to them.

Overall, this is an exciting, well paced story that is very well written very much from a female perspective.