The only one we had in the house; I had read before but had no memory of it, perhaps a bad omen.
I felt quite cheated by this; an apparent spy thriller with a female heroine, so like Simon Mawer or Sebastian Faulkes, but this flattered to deceive; no spying or espionage except in a very domestic context.
The heroine is recruited to join MI5 or 6 or whatever it is by her lover at Cambridge, an elderly don, himself with a slightly ropey history. But her brief is to ‘recruit’ an up and coming novelist for an Encounter like group of intellectuals who will espouse a Western rather than Marxist ideology.
So she does this and of course falls in love with the target, who strikes me as a rather low grade would be novelist. She doesn’t of course tell him what she is doing and when he discovers this, via various betrayals, he appears, novelistically to have turned the tables on her and the whole book may have been written, if I understand the final epistolatory chapter, about her by him.
Not a definite re-read.
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