WILLIAM BOYD, RESTLESS, BLOOMSBURY £17.99

Restless is that rare pleasure, a story that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the last.  Ruth, an irritable single mother and Oxford graduate who is wasting her life teaching English as a second language, has always been told by her own mother, Sally, that “One day someone will come and kill me and then you’ll be sorry.” This threat turns out to be true. Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian recruited as a spy just before the Second World War by the suave and rather sinister Lucas Romer. He tells her that if she works for him, he will get her an English passport. Beautiful Eva soon turns out to be a dab hand at disseminating disinformation through the press. Taught to lie, never to trust, to always have a safe house and to memorise whatever she needs to, she does so well that before long the secret counter intelligence unit is sent to America to try and draw it into the War. Eva and Lucas become lovers, although Ruth knows he was not her father. So why is it that now, in 1976, she wants her daughter to find Lucas and confront him?

Ruth, given her mother’s story in alternate chapters, is at first disbelieving, then suspicious, before being caught up in a web of intrigue set by a woman as clever as Scheherazade. She has her own problems in the shape of her small son’s German uncle, a ludicrously funny ex-porno actor who turns up in Oxford, on the run as a  possible Baader-Meinhof terrorist. Ruth’s seedy Seventies life is beautifully caught, from her aggressive feminism to her cheesecloth clothes, but it is of course her mother’s story which compels. What Boyd attempted in Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon is at last achieved in the portrait of a resourceful, dauntless heroine who could eat those of Robert Harris and Sebastian Faulks for breakfast. Despite not being trained in unarmed combat, Eva kills her would-be murderer with a sharpened pencil in the blink of an eye, and doesn’t turn a hair. She never does those things that most male novelists describe when trying to imagine themselves into a woman’s skin: have periods, run breast checks, or, most commonly, experience a monumental orgasm simply by looking at an engorged male member. For this, let us give thanks.  

On the run for the rest of her life, delectable Eva is an apotheosis of Boyd’s twin themes of identity and betrayal, the seeming insider who is, as the title of his best play had it, Good and Bad at Games. Spies and novelists have much in common, not least in being prepared to betray those who fall short of expectations, and Eva, unlike previous heroines, is convincingly cold-hearted and observant, even in her passion. The natural heir to Graham Greene, Boyd has that old-fashioned storytelling zest and style that is always going to make him the ideal present for the men in ones life. He writes beautifully – his description of a don’s “miniature Manhattan” of bottles is one of many perfect, witty images – and is effortlessly better than the kind of thriller writer cited as unfairly neglected by Booker committees. So what is it that makes him fall short of the standard reached by, say, Ian McEwen or Barry Unsworth?

I think it is to do with his characters, which feel as if they belong in a superior film or TV script, not a novel. They have very little internal life of the kind that illuminates our own, and compensate for this by travelling a good deal (Restless is set in Paris, Oxford, New York, Washington, Ottawa and London) and by having a lot of sex. Characters perceive each other with a minimum of detail – hair “severely parted like a schoolboy’s” or “a trimmed moustache and a nervous manner that was at once shy and punctilious.” These are Eva’s observations, and could be taken as a reflection of her lack of emotional engagement with everyone but Lucas - but her daughter’s are just as lazy. Boyd is an immensely ambitious writer, as well as a successful and entertaining one. His true subject, as we discover both from the Proust quotation that prefaces the novel and from the concluding pages, is the way death comes to us all, inexorably and out of the blue. However, until he can give his characters more than an outline for actors to flesh out, he will always be no more and no less than the consummate entertainer and storyteller that he was from the start.