My Mother the Spy

A woman learns her suburban mom was once a secret agent.

RESTLESS

A Novel

By William Boyd

Bloomsbury. 324 pp. $24.95

Halfway through William Boyd's entertaining new novel, Restless , Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother living in Oxford, England, muses to herself, "People lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy." She has good reason to let her thoughts stray in this direction: She's recently discovered that almost everything she knows about her mother, the handsome and spirited 65-year-old British widow, Sally Gilmartin, is an elaborate and long-sustained lie.

For starters, Sally Gilmartin isn't even British. She was born in Moscow and after the Russian Revolution immigrated to France with her father and brother. Her real name is Eva Delectorskaya. In 1939, she was recruited by the British Secret Service and sent to Edinburgh to train. There she perfected her accent, learned an impressive array of mnemonic skills and practiced eluding a six-person team of trained shadows. She put these talents to good use as a British spy during the early years of World War II. Her espionage work was kept meticulously secret. It was also occasionally harrowing.

In 1942, she gave up her intelligence career and returned to Britain, where she married, settled down in Middle Aston and gave birth to Ruth. From this point on, she led an altogether unexceptional life. We learn of the surprising details of Eva's covert past, as Ruth does, in the form of a manuscript that Eva has prepared for her daughter. This manuscript forms half of Restless . The other half is narrated by Ruth Gilmartin and takes place in Oxford in the summer of 1976.

Boyd's primary challenge in this novel is to make both story lines compelling, and, largely, he does. Eva's story is certainly the more eventful one. When we think of World War II British espionage, we expect Eva to prowl the secret corridors of Vichy France or Nazi-occupied Poland. But Boyd sends Eva to a more unexpected and ultimately more interesting destination: America. In upstate New York, Eva works for a group of spies tied to the British Security Coordination. The goal of the BSC is to plant pro-British propaganda in newspapers throughout the world to spur the U.S. government -- and a largely isolationist American population -- into fighting against the Germans. Wars, as we know all too well, are often set in motion on the basis of manipulated intelligence, and Boyd has drawn upon recently revealed historical documents that describe a British spy presence in America of surprising scale and manipulative power.

Of course, there's little in daughter Ruth's life of comparable danger and magnitude. But this doesn't mean that the alternating chapters about her are dull. For one thing, Ruth is an engaging and nicely realized presence. She has her own full existence: a young son, a messy romantic life, unwanted houseguests, a PhD dissertation to finish, a job teaching English as a second language that brings an interesting array of foreign nationals into her Oxford apartment. All these facets are rendered succinctly and skillfully. Perhaps more important, we recognize in Ruth a stubbornness and strength handed down from Eva, who, because of the veiled nature of her spy career, hasn't always been as tender or forthcoming a mother as Ruth would have liked.

This is Boyd's eighth novel and 11th book of fiction, and he has earned a deservedly enthusiastic critical and popular following in Britain and beyond. His characters are vivid and human. He weds the engaging personal lives of his characters to diverse and far-reaching episodes of 20th-century history in a way that feels simultaneously accurate and intimate.

But Restless doesn't have the depth and gravity of the very best spy literature. To reveal Eva's secret life in a self-penned (though expertly polished) manuscript is a somewhat creaky device, and Boyd doesn't always slow down long enough to articulate Eva's complex motivations for sacrificing her safety and integrity for a country not even her own. Still, Restless is a gripping and smartly crafted spy thriller set against a fascinating and largely hidden episode in U.S.-British relations. By this measure, the book is an absorbing success. ·

John Dalton teaches in the writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is the author of the novel "Heaven Lake."