Restless by William Boyd

published 2006   section set in 1976

I made a bit of an effort for Hamid, though my heart wasn’t really in it. I rather relished these rare evenings alone but I washed my hair and put on some dark grey eyeshadow. I was going to wear my platform boots but didn’t want to tower over him so I settled for some clogs, jeans and an embroidered cheesecloth smock. My burn-dressing was less conspicuous now – under the cheesecloth of the smock it formed a neat lump the size of a small sandwich. While I waited for him I set a kitchen chair outside on the landing at the top of the stairs and drank a beer. The light was soft and hazy and dozens of swifts jinked and dived above the treetops, the air filled with their squeakings like a kind of semi-audible, shrill static.

Hamid arrived, wearing a dark suit and a tie. He said I looked ‘very nice’ though I could tell he was a little disappointed.

observations: This was a promising enough concept: a daughter who finds that her mother had an unknown secret life as a spy, and that this life might just be coming to catch up with her. The narrative switches between mother and daughter, between the Second World War and 1976. It’s an intriguing idea, but I didn’t think it worked. Firstly, Boyd just didn’t seem to be that good at doing a woman’s perspective, so to have two females as main characters was a mistake. The summer of 1976 was memorable: hot and atmospheric, but he makes nothing of that. There is a history don at All Souls with a computer on his desk (in 1976? no) and photocopied photos being used for ID (no – photocopying was still quite rare, and photos were unrecognizable). 

Above, the narrator mentions a burn on her shoulder – this happens in a very bizarre and unconvincing incident involving a teapot and a bath, but there seems to be no reason for it at all. I am used to proper thrillers – where everything is point, or at least potential point - and I wrongly assumed her clumsiness was a clue: perhaps she was going blind? But the whole of the modern section, really, led to nothing. And her childhood was odd: one sentence implies that the house she lived in was grand and big enough to have a ‘library’, but nothing else would lead you to think that.

Meanwhile, the sections in the war were more intriguing, but involved the mother being trained to a very high degree as a top-level spy, and then being sent to write fake news stories in an office – she just didn’t seem to have any need for the training we all enjoyed reading about, or else she was being wasted on her job. And really, it was hard to get worked up about the importance or jeopardy involved in fake news stories, try though he did….

There were other things wrong: at a vital moment a contact ‘thought for a bit and then said, ‘Amsterdam?’’ But later Eva says ‘He had said ‘Amsterdam’ instantly, confidently, sure that this was the answer she expected.’ Well both those things can’t be true, and we never really got to the bottom of what happened. The child has ‘a fritter of pencils and wax crayons around him’ – what does this mean? The lights in a restaurant are like ‘albescent moons’: this is just affectation – albescent means ‘becoming white’, so it adds nothing to the description.

If the book had been exciting and compelling I probably would have made less of these issues: boredom brings out the inner pedant.

The picture is from a 1976 fashion magazine. More fiction set in 1976 tomorrow.