Boyd,
William. Restless. Bloomsbury. October 2006. c.352p. ISBN 1-59691-236-7.
ISBN-13 978-1-59691-236-6. $24.95. Fictions.
In his latest novel, Boyd (A
Good Man in Africa) entwines two stories.
One, set in England in 1976, focuses on the everyday preoccupations
of Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother who teaches English to foreigners
in Oxford. Ruth’s
life changes when her mother, Sally, begins to reveal her past
to her daughter. In the early years of World War II, Sally,
whose real name is Eva Delectorskaya, was recruited as a spy
by British intelligence. Sent to New York in 1941, she spreads
black propaganda in an attempt to coax the United States into
the war. On a mission in New Mexico, Eva was betrayed and had
to kill a man to survive. Unable to trust her team, she escaped
to Canada and eventually returned to England, where she lives
in seclusion under a new identity, waiting for her betrayer
to track her down. While some readers may be annoyed by the
author’s
stylistic tics, particularly the profusion of paired adverbs
(e.g., people speak “seriously,
weightily” and shrug “hopelessly,
helplessly”),
others will enjoy this glimpse of wartime dirty tricks. For
larger public libraries.