Julie and Romeo

Well, you cannot say that this blog does not bring you variety. After a week of spies, behold we are entering the land of retirement romance. Is there even a name for that yet? Silver passion? In any case, I am all for equal opportunities and everyone getting what they want, and it’s true that the elderly are poorly represented in fiction. And even as I typed that sentence, I wondered whether I was allowed to use the word ‘elderly’, whether it’s considered ageist and the polite thing to do is call everyone over 60 in their late middle age. Given that late middle age, by any definition, is a huge demographic, it’s a sign of our youth-obsessed times that we don’t see them around so much in books, films and television programmes. However, Jeanne Ray is here to put an end to all that, and whilst I wasn’t quite sure what I would get with this novel, it turned out to be an absolute charmer.

Julie Roseman and Romeo Cacciamani are rival florists in Boston, whose families have hated each other for many a long year. No one really knows why, but when Julie’s daughter, Sandy, and Romeo’s son, Tony, fell in love as teenagers, it couldn’t have been more West Side Story. The families kept them apart and the bad blood on either side grew steadily more toxic. But that’s old history now and decades have passed since then. Julie’s marriage broke up, Sandy married, had children, divorced and moved her small family back home, and Sandy’s sister, Nora, has grown past teenage rebellion to become a very scary real estate agent who knows not just her own mind, but everyone else’s too. Julie is content with her life, but there isn’t that much joy in it for her.

She’s at a seminar entitled ‘Making Your Small Business Thrive’ when she bumps into Romeo Cacciamani and they end up having coffee. Well, you’ll all see where this is going. The problem is not with Julie and Romeo, but with the fierce resistance to their relationship that comes from their children – all grown up now, of course, but with plenty of energy to carry the feud into the next generation. Before they’ve even reached a second date, Sandy is in tears, Nora is reading her mother the riot act, and Romeo’s sons are coming over to decapitate small pots of daffodils to get their point across. And just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, Julie’s ex-husband turns up to take a look at the accounting books and throw his fists around. Julie’s sure that if she can find out what caused the original vendetta, the families could make peace – but how is it that no one seems to know?

This could, of course, have been dreadful. But it is just so funny and entertaining, not least because it is so unsentimental. People say things like ‘I haven’t had this much time to think since I had my gallbladder out,’ and ‘I wondered what I could have been thinking of, asking a man to meet me in a store with fluorescent overhead lighting.’ Honestly, it’s a hoot. And the families are very well imagined, particularly sad Sandy and the appalling elderly matriarch Grammy Cacciamani. Jeanne Ray is very good at how badly families can behave, not just towards their enemies, but within their own clans, because there is so much less reserve employed with other family members than your average human being. Given that Julie and Romeo are the leads here and we’re supposed to be rooting for them, there wasn’t much sense of poetic justice that the ban imposed on their own children had come back to bite them, but no matter. The rivalry takes up more page space than the romance, and in no time at all we’re too busy watching roses get salted at dawn to worry too much about fine slicing the moral universe.

People, this is not Anna Karenina, or Shakespeare come to that, do not expect it. But it’s delightfully written comic entertainment, which can be hard to come by on rainy days. It is also very much a love story between two 60-year-olds, let’s be clear what you’re getting. I read it between a couple of very serious books and thoroughly enjoyed the light relief.

Sweet Tooth

The last book for spy week is Sweet Tooth, written allegedly by Ian McEwan. It may be that reading so much about espionage has given me a conspiracy complex, but I was tempted to ring up the publisher and say ‘What have you done with Ian McEwan and who is this strange imposter?’ It’s just that the novel was so….cheery. And playful. Nothing dreadful happened in it, unless we count the early 70s in the UK. You wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anybody, and this from the man who used to bring us butchery, bestiality, incest and dwarves!

Well, anyway. Serena Frome (pronounced to rhyme with ‘plume’) is an extremely attractive good girl swot, daughter of a gentle Anglican vicar and a rather bossy mother, who happens to be quite good at maths and likes reading. Her mother persuades her that it’s her duty as a woman to take on a challenging male subject at university and so Serena goes off to Cambridge and gets herself a deplorable third class degree. But all is not lost. The reading has continued apace, leading to a brief stint as a book critic on a student rag. She loses the job when her head is turned by Solzhenitsyn (who she discovers right after reading Ian Fleming) and for a few heady weeks she fills her column with serious political outrage rather than the fluffy chat she was commissioned to write. But in turn, this brings her to the attention of a middle-aged history don with whom she has a rather beautifully described affair, and who grooms her for the Secret Service.

Like Emma Bovary before her (and what would have happened to her if Solzhenitsyn had turned out to be the literary squeeze of choice?), reading saves her and gets her into trouble at the same time. Serena’s expectations of a glamourous life with MI5 are soon destroyed by the reality of low-paid grunt work and a grungy London bedsit. She can’t resist an attempted dalliance with a fellow operative that doesn’t really go anywhere, and she makes a good girl friend only to fall out with her. McEwan paints a somewhat perfunctory portrait of the troubled seventies here, with galloping inflation, the three-day-week and the emergence of the IRA offering far more cause for alarm than the elderly Cold War, and everything is in awkward transition. The bureau has no more idea how to treat women than terrorists (who are probably not too far apart in their mental hierarchy). But then Serena does get the hint of a job, although it seems a strange one, and it’s her skills as a reader that stand as qualification.

The Service wants to fund right-minded authors, paying them a generous living wage in the hope (no Russian-type oppression here) that they will write the sort of rebuttals of Communism that encourage the West to stay free. They’ve identified a possible candidate, one Tom Haley, writing a PhD at Sussex and author of some intriguing early stories, and Serena is sent, in the guise of an innocent and independent representative of a literary foundation, to get him on board. And here’s where the novel really starts, with a series of interpolated stories that Serena reads in preparation for her trip. The stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the early work of none other than Ian McEwan, and as Tom Haley grows in literary stature, hanging out with Martin Amis and being taken on by the publisher Tom Maschler (McEwan’s first publisher), and writing the kind of book that will make Serena’s employers foam at the mouth, you sense the author having a great deal of fun. Inevitably, given Serena’s history up to this point, she falls in love with her charge, and thereupon begins the breast-beating about whether and/or how she can possibly tell him she is not who he thinks she is.

Given that pretty much all money is dirty money somewhere along the trail, and given that most aspiring authors would sell their grandmas to fund full-time writing, the dilemma can seem a bit quaint and twee. But it’s all very entertaining, so it doesn’t really matter. We also seem to have turned a corner, leaving the official realm of spies and their usual stories far behind. But as Bookboxed put in a comment yesterday (and I hope he doesn’t mind being paraphrased), the novel is playing with the whole concept of spying, and if we leave the Cold War trappings behind, what we get does hunker down close to the root of the concept: people putting each other under surveillance and keeping secret their reasons for doing so. It is concerned with what spying is basically about, and the end of the novel has a few big surprises in store. There were times in this novel when I really wasn’t sure about the tropes McEwan was playing with, whether they were too over-used to be any good. But I have to hand it to him, he pulled it out of the bag at the end, which left me with a big and completely unexpected smile on my face. Now the question is: when the ransom demand comes in for the original Ian McEwan, should we pay it or let this chap carry on his place?

Red Joan

This novel is based on a true story from 1999, in which 87-year-old Melita Norwood was identified as one of the most important and longest-serving Soviet spies of the Cold War. A recent defector from Russia had brought documentary evidence with him that put her squarely in the frame, and although her case was considered by Parliament, the decision was brought not to prosecute on the grounds of her old age. Jennie Rooney was a student at Cambridge in 1999, studying with the history professor whom the defector had originally contacted, and evidently the story took a hold of her imagination.

So, the narrative opens with an elderly Joan Stanley reading her morning paper, in which an obituary appears for Sir William Mitchell, SOE in the war, subsequently an advisor in intelligence matters to the government, whose death appeared to occur peacefully in his sleep. But Joan knows better. As soon as she reads the article, she realises that something serious has finally happened to blow her cover, and it isn’t long before she has Security Services knocking at her door. The two young operatives are distinctly un-cuddly, and they bundle her off to be interviewed at length. It is Sunday morning and they have until Friday, they tell her, to collect the facts of her case together before it is presented to the Home Secretary. Joan isn’t sure to what extent their confident demeanour is a bluff, and she has a grown-up son, Nick, whom she is desperate to protect from the truth, as well as old alliances she does not want to betray. And so begins a game of cat and mouse as the interrogators try to trap her, and Joan is forced to recall those distant days in Cambridge in the late 30s when it all began.

As the interview unfolds, so do Joan’s memories. One night lying sleepless in her room in Newnham College where she is reading natural sciences, Joan becomes aware of someone tapping on her window and asking to be let in. Standing on the sill in scarlet high-heeled shoes is the glamourous and confident Sonya, caught out after curfew but not letting that become a problem for her. Sonya takes a liking to Joan’s mink coat (on loan from a cousin) and to Joan herself, who she starts to take along to Communist gatherings at the university. And it’s at one of these that Joan meets Sonya’s cousin, Leo. Leo is a true devotee to the cause, in the middle of an economics PhD that he hopes will change the ideology of the world, and Joan falls deeply in love with him, though not with his politics. They make an uneasy threesome, as it’s clear to the reader, if not always to Joan, that the relationship between Leo and Sonya is more complicated than it appears. But Joan is entranced by their dynamism and their beauty. And then when the war comes along, it becomes apparent that Joan has always had more to offer them than she ever suspected.

I won’t give any more away as the slow reveal of what happened, whether Joan is guilty or not, and if so, how she overcame her own disinclination and beliefs to help Leo and Sonya, is the best part of the book. It’s beautifully plotted and contains a few surprising twists and turns.

However, I will have to admit that I did have a big problem with this book, which was distressing, as I’d anticipated it keenly and wanted so much for it to be wonderful. But by about halfway through, I couldn’t help noticing that people ‘whispered’ a lot. In fact, it began to feel like a nervous tic, cropping up as shorthand for buried emotion time and time again. I began to dread the appearance of the word, and to wish fervently that a conversation would pass by at normal volume. Basically, it ruined the experience of the novel for me. Once I’d finished this book, I felt I really ought to collect a little empirical evidence, just to check whether or not I’d lost my marbles. So I did a count. In the last 100 pages of the novel, over the course of 24 passages of dialogue, there were 39 instances of whispering. This does seem like overuse of a distinctive speech tag. Whilst everyone whispered, Joan was the main culprit. Okay, she’s an old lady, quite overwhelmed by the turn events have taken, you might think. But she whispered just as much in her youth. She may have had a lurid past, full of acts of courage and love and treachery, but she seems to have been permanently incapable of speaking up for herself.

Whether this is fair or not – and I must take my irritation into account – I was disappointed overall with the quality of the writing. In one way, this book doesn’t put a foot wrong – it is a perfect encapsulation of all those unwritten rules about writing and a book that is entirely of the moment. But there seemed to me nothing quirky or original about the voice, nothing beyond its unflinching competence. Jennie Rooney – that relentless whispering aside – is a very talented writer, but whether her books will still be around in ten years, I have no idea. But please read other reviews of it as well as mine – I have yet to read a review that hasn’t loved this book and I think I am very much the exception

The Girl In Berlin

So it’s spy novels all this week and first up is a very classy example of the genre indeed, Elizabeth Wilson’s The Girl in Berlin. Set in 1951, in the period of confusion and mistrust that followed the disappearance of two British spies, Burgess and Maclean it’s a novel about ambiguity and about how hard it is to distinguish friends from enemies.

Colin Harris is a Communist sympathiser who has returned unexpectedly from Berlin to visit his old friends, Alan and Dinah Wentworth (who just happens to work at the Courtauld for Anthony Blunt). Colin has a murky past with a murder trial from which he escaped free but besmirched, and his presence in the UK is a cause for suspicion amongst the authorities. In a sense they’re right; Colin has fallen in love with a German, Frieda Schroder, who he wants to marry and bring back with him, and Frieda is not at all what she seems. But at the same time, Colin is a bit of a pathetic character, an idealist without clout, clumsy and awkward, the sort of person who always gets on the wrong side of others without really meaning to.

Jack McGovern is a member of Special Branch who is tasked to find out what Colin is up to by a real spy, the suave and enigmatic Miles Kingdom. This isn’t really Jack’s sort of thing, though he’d like it to be. He’s a straight man, ethical and honest and – clearly working without enough information from his mentor – completely out of his depth. Before long, Colin Harris has managed to put himself in a compromising situation. He is seen with a German defector, a scientist with a tell-all autobiography in his hands, and only a few hours after this sighting, the corpse of the scientist is found. Soon Kingdom is sending McGovern out to Berlin and into a hotbed of dangerous characters, who seem to be playing both sides for fools. The only people he likes and feels he can trust are Colin and Frieda; is he making a dreadful mistake?

So this is the kind of spy novel, reminiscent of le Carré, in which we move in a fog of uncertainty, unsure who is trustworthy, wondering what everyone is up to. Jack is a plucky amateur, trying to play with the big boys as if he were a professional, and putting his life on the line as a result. The narrative juggles a number of intertwined plot threads and quite a large cast of characters with elegance, and the writing is sharp and atmospheric. My only criticism is that the subplot with the Wentworths, who are both beautifully drawn characters, doesn’t quite shine the way it might. But when the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, finally, I had nothing but admiration for this clever, engaging novel. I thought it had an excellent denouement, the best of the novels I read for this week, horrifying, harsh and plausible.

One final note: this is a literary novel, a modern piece of noir fiction and reads much better as such; I wouldn’t suggest this is the kind of book to take on a beach. But it really repays careful attention and I’ll certainly be reading her two previous novels on the strength of it.