One of my favourite of his books, despite my copy having been in the bath some years ago.
Thematically, very John le Carré – set possibly in the late 1960’s and featuring rather bland foreign office types doing apparently rather bland foreign office work.
Castle, the central figure, had worked as a diplomat in South Africa, where he met and smuggled out his wife Sarah during the apartheid era, aided by some South African Marxist aligned freedom fighters. They are now settled, along with Sarah’s black son Sam, in comfortable middle class Berkhamsted.
But Castle, probably out of gratitude rather than for any ideological or financial reason, is delivering material to the Russians. The foreign office get wind of a traitor, but clumsily murder one of Castle’s colleagues assuming he is their man.
When the leaks don’t end, Castle knows that he must escape and engineers an apparent separation from Sarah. He is smuggled to Moscow, but Sarah and Sam cannot follow him in the absence of paperwork/a passport for Sam. So the book ends with the family, which is all Castle lived for, torn apart by geography, politics and bureaucracy.
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