Tinker, tailor

    The Spy Game is a quiet book, and one of studied calm, but the writing's clarity has a depth to it which develops on reflection. I was struck by Georgina Harding's economy and restraint in controlling her story so expertly - both its elements and its method of unfolding - and in writing about children and childhood with a well-pitched detachment and an affecting lack of sentimentality.
     Beginning in the winter of 1961 - the Cold War, a time of spies, traitors and apparently ordinary people (the famous Kroger case) leading double lives - it features Peter and Anna, whose mother goes out one day and does not return. Unable to accept the awful reality that she has been killed in an accident, the children imagine that she was a spy and has gone underground, and they set about finding evidence to support their theory. Their quest to discover the truth about the woman who was "rubbed out" of their lives continues even into adulthood, long after "the spy game" had become just such a childish pursuit.
     Anna is a convincing narrator, and her episodic account of events before and after her mother's disappearance is a dispassionately edited one. She takes piano lessons but prefers practising scales because "they didn't trick you into feelings", and (heartrendingly) she plays them to cover the silence: "piano practice filled the house with order, with a picture of family life". Looking back, a scene is "... one of those full moments that make a memory, when everything else falls away. People later classify childhoods as happy or unhappy. Best would be to tot up those moments when nothing else mattered. That was what childhood was for." 

Well-judged detail (behavioural as well as physical) catches the 1960s period, and the study of memory, imagination and identity implicit in the story makes for a book which leaves the reader with questions and something of the unease of its characters. It invites an inward look or two, and that makes it no less powerful as a fine piece of fiction.

    

Comments

[Tara]

I've seen several good reviews for this. I'm keeping my eye out for it.

[lena]

This sounds heartbreaking in a most appealing way.

[Elaine]

I have just read this and reviewed over on Random. I thought it an excellent book and captured the post Cold war feeling of the time beautifully.