RESTLESS by William Boyd

joannapiano

Enjoyed the TV version and am half way through the book.I am unsure as to why this book is titled Restless.Is it because Eva is constantly watching for the next attempt on her life ? Or am I missing something obvious in the plot?

Joannapiano you're absolutely right. the title refers to Eva/Sally's unending watchfulness. It applies to her but I think it applies to all spies and double agents. You can never relax, you can never trust anyone. It's a big price to pay.

lillian

having read "Restless" and watched the tv adaptation i loved them both and intend to read more of William Boyd's books.......however i have a freind who insists that the story ending is indication that it is all the wanderings of a elderly lady with dementia,re-reading the last part of the book i can see how she is seeing this but my version was that it is all true...does anyone one else see it this way....Lillian

No -- i wouldn't do that to my readers, lillian. I hate those -- 'he woke up and it was all a dream' devices or 'she made it up and wrote it as a novel'. No,no -- Eva/Sally's anxiety is entirely real!

BoomerBabe

I missed the tv adaptation but from what's been said, it was no loss.
I too found it really difficult to get into this book. I couldn't get my head round the name Delectorskaya. Every time I came to it I had to stop and think how to say it in my head. It was irritating. I think things began to take off for me when Eva decides to seduce Romer and gets him to kiss her. From then on, the story gathered momentum and I couldn't leave it alone. I am the same age as the older Eva and in 1976 was a similar age to Ruth. That long, hot summer sticks in my memory. I was 25 and ran a summer playscheme so was outside a lot. Perhaps that added to my enjoyment of the book. I wore an embroidered cheesecloth shirt and owned a pair of clogs and high boots. We drank and smoked without restraint...happy days!!

Question for William Boyd then, as I got a free copy thankyou!
What gave you the idea for this complicated scenario? Is this story just coming out, like the Bletchely Park stuff? I loved the way it linked to other, now well known Russian spies. Is any of this remotely true?
Fascinating!

As a matter of interest Delectorskaya is pronounced exactly as written. It's just a five-syllable name (like Fearnley-Whittingstall, for example)l

And as a reade myself I LOVE complicated plots. I like to read a book where I'm forced to think and second-guess. It's a powerful aesthetic pleasure, i find, and it's one I try to reproduce in all my novels.

annemac101

Thanks GN for my copy of the book,I am a quarter through it but have just watched the TV drama. It kept me on the edge of my seat especially at the end I really thought Eva's daughter was going to find her dead when she returned to get her son's jacket ,it was the scary music that did it. I enjoy stories set during the war and loved this one.
I'd like to ask William if he has any say in who is cast for the TV drama? Lucas was a handsome man but the years were not kind to him and I didn't expect him to look the way he did. Also how do you feel when the scriptwriter changes places and other parts of your story?
I look forward to reading more of your books as this is my first one.

Yes, I have quite a lot of influence. I usually get on very well with the filmmakers and they're happy for me to be something of a backseat driver (though i don't have a veto). It is a collaborative art form, everyone can contribute. As for casting -- so often the actor you really want isn't available and so you have to begin a search. the more involved you are as a writer the more chance you have of being pleased with the eventual film. I was tremendously pleased with the TV adaptations of Any Human Heart and Restless, for example.

As for Lucas ageing -- it can happen! 30 years can make an enormous difference to a human face -- especially if you haven't looked after yourself!

thickofit

You adapt your books for film, I know, but an awful lot of writers don't. Why is this? I'd have thought that having once created the story, writers would think they were best placed to adapt for the screen.

Is it fun re-imagining your story in a different medium?

It's a great other thing to do, thickof it. Writing a novel is such a solitary business that i find i really enjoy the collaboration of films, having colleagues, going to meetings, hanging out on the set. It is fun and fascinating.. Also, i like the world of film -- many of my friends are actors and directors. The film industry doesn't really like authors adapting their own books -- they feel the author will be too protective. in fact it's often the other way around -- the book is always there -- the film is a bonus and as the author and only begetter of the story you are uniquely placed to authorise bold changes!

Heather84

Question for William Boyd:

Both your protagonists in RESTLESS are female. How far do you feel male and female narrative voices differ? How easy do you find it, as a writer, to inhabit a female persona?

I do write from the point of view of a woman from time to time. In Restless, obviously, but also in my novel Brazzaville Beach and The blue Afternoon.

My technique, so to speak, is to ignore all received wisdom about sexuality and gender (Women are from Venus etc) and concentrate exclusively on personality and character. I know exactly what type of people my female characters are and their behaviour is determined by their nature rather than their sex. I think it is very plausible -- many women readers and critics have told me this! I think also it would work very well the other way round -- if you were a woman writer wanting to write from the point of view of a man. Forget sexual politics; rely on personality.

JaneLewis1

Hi, William, thanks for coming here. I was interested to know that our British spies worked in the States, New York (?) during the war. Was this rare? it made a good story.
And the apparent suicides --- was this based on fact, meaning had this really happened to our British Spies during the war?
I am always keen to know what is fact and what is fiction -- apologies if this wish of mine produces a strange question.
However, I loved the atmosphere of this book. and found it to be a new 'take' on 2WW stories, and very interesting as as result.
Kind regards Jane Lewis

Yes, it's entirely true (though little-known). And the feigned suicides are authentic. The most famous being the assassination of a Russian defector called Krivitsky in a Washington hotel room. Door locked on the inside, three suicide notes but in fact an NKVD murder.

DavidH22

Found it a gripping story which I thoroughly enjoyed especially the way the lives of the two generations came together for the climax. Any reason you decided on a mother and daughter as the main characters and had you given any thought to making the two characters males before plumping for females? Hope you answer Heather84's question as I had the same thought.
Is there any basis in fact of the work Eva and her colleagues did in America before the USA came into the Second World War although it would not surprise me in the least if it was true?

Thank you, DavidH22. I wanted to write a spy novel but i wanted to make it fresh in some way. So I thought about having a young woman at the centre rather than a man (it's such a macho world) and cast the whole arena of WW2 spying in a different light.

The whole US operation is entirely authentic. British Security Coordination, as it was known , was a massively successful covert operation to manipulate US media into becoming pro-interventionist -- and to damage the US isolationist cause.

Highly embarrassing, post war -- so it's been brushed miles under the carpet. I'm the first novelist to explore this forgotten corner of WW2 history.

krispycreme

There was a Baader Meinhof subplot in the modern part of the book and also an Iranian revolution subplot but neither of these really went anywhere. Was this just a tease, or were you trying to say something about suspicion and peril continuing?

We forget how much terrorism was around in the 1970s (not to mention the IRA). Baader meinhof was very active and the Iranian revolution was about to start. I wanted to remind readers of this but also to show how Eva/Slly's paranoia was beginning to infect Ruth. Ruth, despite herself, begins to find herself acting like her mother -- and here are these two suspicious elements right on her doorstep in Oxford. I was living in Oxford in 1976 and remember the period very well. We forget how frightening it was -- bombs in pubs, in shoe shops, railway waiting rooms, airports etc. Easy to become suspicious!

flopsybunny

I think the Prenslo incident in the book is based on the real-life Venlo incident on the Dutch-German border?

What I wanted to ask is why the agent gave Eva the wrong code word? Surely if it was all a set-up he would have given her the one she was expecting? I know this is a point of detail but it is really bothering me!

And why does her explanation have such a positive impact on the top brass? The Brits were duped and it's hard to see why the fact the agent said Amsterdam rather than Paris (or possibly the other way round) would have improved the situation.

Thanks - I really enjoyed the book.

Yes, you're absolutely right, flopsybunny. The Venlo incident was a massive secret service cock-up (and has been brushed far under the carpet). You could argue that there was a mole in the Dutch secret service (it was a combined operation) that allowed the Germans to snatch two top british spies at Venlo. In my 'Prenslo' version I wanted Eva to sense something was going wrong. The Dutch agent had been wrongly briefed on the double-password. The sort of error that can so easily happen during operations. In fact, behind the scenes, it was probably Romer who passedon the wrong information. He wanted the mission to fail. And he wantted the Dutch to be blamed to cover his back.

The Venlo incident was a disaster for the British at the start of the war. Their whole spy network in northern Europe was compromised by this kidnapping. Hence all the fuss by the top brass.

closetgran

I think - especially if flopsybunny's suggestion is right - that your books are very well-researched. So were there really loose canons like Romer operating more or less as freelances under SIS at that time? It seems extraordinary!

Yes, there were. Churchill himself set up the SOE (Special Operations Executive) precisely to add to the store of loose cannons. There was also a network called 'Z' that used travelling businessmen as impromptu spies. Not everything was run by MI6!

petitpois

Were you a spy? How do you know so much about that world?

Never been a spy, Petitpois, but I have known a few... You can find out a massive amount about the secret world now from books. Everything has opened up -- and of course I use my imagination - often the most direct route to the 'truth' -- whatever that may be.

eurggh

Is Delectorskya an actual Russian name? Did you mean people to think "delectable" when they read it?

Yes it is -- the female patronymic of Delectorski. I stole the name from a Russian model of Matisse -- he painted her a lot and was his muse, after a fashion. And you're absolutely right -- the @delectable@ echo is definitely there to be picked up!

Goodjeans

Hello William

I really loved Restless and would love to read more of your work. Where would you recommend I start, given that Restless was definitely my type of thing? Are your other books similar?

You might like my latest novel, Goodjeans. It's called Waiting for Sunrise and is about a young actor who becomes a reluctant spy in World War 1.

hopefulgran

Do you have a view about what happens to Ruth at the end of the book? I was rather hoping she was going to end up with the academic, Thomas or whatever he was called.

I think she may well end up with him. But I don't like to tie up all the loose ends at the end of my novels. Life isn't like that -- we don't know the answers to everything and the end of every individual journey and I want my novels to reflect that ambiguity about the human condition

frangipane

Hi, is it true that you make wine? Are you very hands on? And is the wine you produce any good?!

I'm the proprietor of a small vineyard in SW France. I don't actually make the wine (talented winemakers do that) but it's marketed under my name and the name of our house -- if you're interested, frangipane! We make a rose, a dry white and a good drinking red -- called CHATEAU PECACHARD

granIT

The spy story is a genre but restless doesn't really feel like a genre novel. Do you like using genre as a basis for writing and how much of a struggle is it to escape the conventions and do something different?

I go to genre a lot to add some dynamism to the story I'm telling -- a motor. Armadillo is a conspiracy thriller set in the City. The Blue Afternoon (a love story) borrows from the serial-killer novel.

The spy novel is so alluring because it deals with such big questions -- identity, duplicity, betrayal, jeopardy -- for this reason many so-called literary noveists have been drawn to it; Joseph Conrad,Graham greeene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, John Banville, Ian McEwan, for example have all written at least one spy novel. As a rule, the easiest way to escape genre is to avoid cliche -- cliches of narrative, character and language.