I’ve read several books in the last few years about ordinary people recruited as spies. I think it’s a mini-genre. Have you noticed? Here they are in order of how much I enjoyed them.
This past year, I read Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd, about a young man, a travel writer, who accidentally scores an interview with Patrice Lumumba, newly elected president of the People’s Republic of the Congo. (The time is the early 1960s.) The next thing Gabriel knows, Lumumba’s been assassinated and his interview has been buried by the press. Suddenly he acquires a handler from MI6 and his life is turned upside down. A frightening incident from Gabriel’s childhood ratchets up the tension. Boyd is a lovely, graceful writer; this one’s a keeper.
Then there was Transcription by Kate Atkinson, in which a young woman is recruited during World War II to keep an eye on British Fascists. Years later, when she’s sure that part of her life is a thing of the past, it catches up with her. Atkinson’s one of my favorite authors and I thought Transcription was quite good. Anything Atkinson writes about World War II is excellent.
I enjoyed Ilium by Lea Carpenter, in which an unnamed young woman, looking for adventure, falls in love with, Marcus, a sophisticated older man. Just when everything is going well, he asks her for a “favor.” Marcus turns out to be a spy, involved in a CIA/Mossad plot called Operation Ilium. Our narrator agrees to help; she becomes the unlikely art advisor to a wealthy Russian family on Cap Ferrat. Various unreliable players ratchet up the suspense as our narrator tries to find the moral center.
And lastly, there’s Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, set during the Cold War, about a young woman recruited by MI5 to encourage writers with the right sort of politics to keep writing. Some reviewers took it seriously as a spy novel, some thought it was a spoof of spy novels. I thought it was lightweight McEwan, moderately entertaining, a good book for the summer.
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