Boyd, whose latest novel Restless was released late last month, says the book came out of his own burgeoning obsession with the spy biz. A blatant departure from his earlier novels; but perhaps a natural progression for this author whose interests have taken him from country to country and up the ranks from Glascow and Nice Universities, through a PhD at Oxford, through the academic rail and into filmaking.
“He is in two minds as to whether his latest novel, Restless, published next month, would make a good film. It is the story of a mother revealing in a series of letters to her daughter that she is not all that she seems to be – that she is not Sally Gilmartin, as widely supposed, but Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré co-opted by the British secret services in the run-up to the Second World War. It is a tense drama, tightly plotted and tremendously exciting.
“After Any Human Heart [his previous novel, a sprawling 500-page imagined Life], I wanted to do something ‘well-carpentered’ and the idea of having two women at its heart was an intriguing imaginative exercise,” he says.
“During his research for Any Human Heart, Boyd had become interested in the “psychology of spying” and the motivations of Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Maclean in particular. He has various theories about what might have driven these men (“members of White’s, for God’s sake”) to spy for the Soviet Union, but the heroine of Restless is a small cog in the machine that flourished before Pearl Harbour with the specific intent of luring the Americans to join the Second World War. This consisted of planting fake maps and spinning anti-German stories in foreign newspapers – dirty tricks and media manipulation.”
- UK Telegraph
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