Tag Archives: MI5

Deception’s Toll: An Unlikely Spy

22 Monday Nov 2021

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Review: An Unlikely Spy, by Rebecca Starford
Ecco, 2021. 338 pp. $28

Evelyn Varley has made something of herself, she thinks. It’s late 1939, and the girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Lewes, East Sussex, has come a long way since she won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, then Oxford, where she took Firsts in German and literature. Along the way, she befriended Sally Wesley, a girl from a wealthy family that practically adopted Evelyn, showering her with the warmth, hospitality, excursions, gifts, and spirited conversation she never received at home. And when war breaks out, Sally’s father recommends Evelyn to a friend in government, and presto! she gets a job with the War Office.

At first, that means typing and filing, nothing glamorous, and her office is situated in an old prison, to boot. But eventually, MI5 recruits her to infiltrate an organization of British Nazis. Appalled by their views, especially their violent anti-Semitism, Evelyn nevertheless steels herself to the task, unaware that she will have to choose between her conscience, loyalty to country, and her lifelong friends.

The Olympia Exhibition Centre, London, where a British Union of Fascists meeting in 1934 turned violent, costing the movement support. At its height, the BUF boasted more than 50,000 members. (Courtesy Kenneth Allen, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Character-driven thrillers are unusual in themselves, and this one’s terrific. Don’t be put off by the opening, a somewhat confusing section that takes place after the war. I think the author wants you to know that something shocking has happened, to hold your interest, after which the novel goes into Evelyn’s back story. It’s a prologue by another name, and I understand why Starford takes this approach, but it feels clumsy in parts, not at all like the rest of the book. The narrative sorts itself out soon enough, though, and you see how Evelyn unwittingly trains for her future career.

At her boarding school, as the poor girl, she’s the “charity case,” the butt of vicious hazing. Sally rescues her somewhat, being an outsider too, a connection I find a little hard to believe. But if it’s a false note, it’s the only one. Evelyn succeeds socially on her own where Sally doesn’t, by copying their tormentors and earning their acceptance. The price she pays is steep, however — forgetting who she is, learning her new friends’ contempt for her origins, and hiding behind a dissembling heart. Years later:

Sometimes, as Evelyn lay in her bed upstairs, she was wracked by loneliness. She loved her parents, but now she could see them for their true selves, free from the burnish of childish idolatry or just plain youthful ignorance. She knew her father belittled her because he couldn’t face the idea of her one day looking down on him, and she recognized how meager her mother’s existence had become, counting out her shillings at the bakery and going without new clothes or books or an outing to a restaurant, refusing any activity that she deemed indulgent. Evelyn was embarrassed by this puritan denial of even the smallest forms of pleasure. She didn’t want her life to be a mere transaction; she wanted to feel the workings of experience deep in her bones. She knew her parents sensed this change in her, but since she could never tell them about what really happened at school, she had to live with the knowledge that they believed she had actually become this person and was not merely wearing a disguise.

Consequently, she’s got the makeup of a perfect operative, capable of assuming a necessary guise, belonging nowhere, therefore adaptable. But once again, she pays an extortionate price for the thrill of being useful, the knowledge that she’s standing up for her beliefs, which leads her to deceive people, including herself.

What a brilliant portrayal, the better for Evelyn’s hesitations and insecurities. So often, spies in fiction have ice water for blood and seldom make mistakes, only bad bets because they’ve been misled or have no choice. Evelyn’s a different sort altogether, struggling not to engage emotionally, wondering every second if she’s overplayed her hand, and unsure what she’s accomplished, if anything. Unlike many in her trade, she shies away from damaging anyone, unaware that she’s done it despite herself. Sally’s fiancé, a handsome, thoughtless brute, thinks of pain as an “accolade,” Evelyn believes, “something to be earned, and something to be inflicted.” She despises him but has yet to learn how the manipulations she’s assigned to perform work the same way. The reader senses what she doesn’t.

Starford has a gift for active physical description that evokes feelings — there are some truly lovely passages —and she’s at her best among the British Nazis. Their rallies, riots, harangues, and even their quiet dinner parties curdle the blood. Their belief beyond all persuasion that Jews have destroyed their lives and run the world has never gone out of style, so that the historical feels like now. I can’t help think that the author has intended a tacit comparison to alt-right conspiracy theorists, no matter what human target they favor.

This chilling, moving novel, at once character-driven and a page-turner, deserves attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Bad Penny: Friends and Traitors

17 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: Friends and Traitors, by John Lawton
Atlantic, 2017. 341 pp. $26

If I were to describe a thriller whose central incident doesn’t happen until around page 200, and whose back-story-laden narrative revolves around an essentially harmless, flamboyantly foolish turncoat spy, you would likely decide that the book was a plodding, pointless tale, not worth your time.

In this case, though, you’d be wrong. The back story reveals England of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties with remarkable vividness, brio, and wit, focusing on, among other issues, laws and prejudice against homosexual behavior, and the equally prejudiced mindset about national security and how to act in its name. You see these come alive through a compelling protagonist, Frederick Troy, not your ordinary copper. Born to Russian émigrés under the name Troitsky, Troy, as even his girlfriends call him, walked away from a scholarship to Oxford to join the London police force and serve in the East End, a tough patch. Recruited to Scotland Yard above more experienced candidates in the late 1930s, he has been solving murders ever since, up until 1958, when the forward action of Friends and Traitors begins. Like many fictional detectives, he sails very close to the wind, and unscrupulous, vicious characters have a way of disappearing when he’s around, whether they belong to the police force or the criminals. So far, he has covered his tracks, but not without attracting suspicion.

Henry_Labouchère, the British parliamentarian whose amendment to an 1885 law intended to combat prostitution made “gross indecency” between males a criminal act. During the 1940s and 1950s especially, the police went out of their way to enforce it.

What threatens to undo Troy at this juncture is his friendship with Guy Burgess, later known as a member of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring; but, as this portrayal would have it, Burgess is very much a junior partner in that game. Still, when he defects with Donald Maclean in 1951, their flight embarrasses and surprises the British intelligence community and causes a rift with its American counterparts. Troy, who has known Burgess for decades, first through family connections, and later because the man keeps crossing his path like a bad penny, has always been suspect for this association. But Troy thinks that what MI5 and Special Branch really object to, aside from shame at their own lapse, is Burgess’s unapologetic, open homosexuality, which to Troy shouldn’t be considered a crime.

Moreover, Burgess’s inability to keep a secret, and the relatively short time he was working for the Foreign Office, suggest he’s not much of a threat. Self-absorbed, boorish, insulting, and vain, yes; but since when are those qualities treasonous? Nevertheless, when Burgess lets it be known in 1958 that he wishes to return to England, several people whom both he and Troy know wind up dead, and others are running scared, including at least one former lover of Troy’s.

From there, the pieces that Lawton has laid in place with seeming casualness turn out to matter in ingenious, unexpected ways, so cleverly that not even Troy understands the depth of his troubles before they arrive. The sentence, “Someone was following Troy,” recurs constantly. For a man of his experience, that’s almost an insult. And since he never takes his medicine quietly, he leads his watchdogs in Special Branch up hill and down dale, at one point leaving a Lewis Carroll poem in a tree for them to puzzle over. Very snarky. But what else would you expect from the youngest child with two twin sisters named Sasha and Masha, each of whom has a particular brand of acting badly, and an oh-so-righteous older brother, Battle of Britain hero, member of Parliament, and all that, who may be prime minister one day? It’s always been Troy’s job to be different in a family of individualists, and he does so with a sharp sense of humor.

Then there’s the prose, which evokes myriad times and places, as with this description of the London Blitz:

It seemed to Troy that the night sky was short on sky’s own colour — blue. Reds it had aplenty, from the bright, post-office-van scarlet of the flames that leapt heavenward from burning buildings to the colouring-book-and-wax-crayon carmine of tracers and the paintbox burnt orange of ack-ack shells popping uselessly among the beaten-metal pewter hue of the barrage balloons. Incendiaries burnt white to silver, and the searchlights sliced up the night with long fingers of pure, clear light. Rarely had he seen a plane hit, either ours or theirs, but when it happened every colour in the rainbow might burst forth.

My only quibble is Burgess himself, who’s so unappealing that if I were Troy, I’d run in the other direction. At times Troy does, yet he also seems fascinated, and I’m not sure why. Burgess’s willingness to say what no one else will? Troy’s stubborn refusal to shun a man whom his conventional older brother has warned him about? Hard to know, but I still recommend Friends and Traitors.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.