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THE SPY GAME
by Georgina Harding
Bloomsbury, April 2009
320 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0747597081


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

One morning in 1961, Caroline Wyatt, the German-born mother of Peter and Anna, gets into her car and drives off into the fog, never to be seen again, at least by her children. The following day, Anna is told that "Mummy has gone to heaven," and that's an end to it - no final farewells, no funeral, no grave - just an aching absence that cries out for explanation.

Anna's elder brother Peter believes he knows what might have happened. The news on that fateful morning was full of the (true) story of the Portland spy ring, Russian secret agents living apparently normal British lives while conveying various secrets to their Soviet masters. Among them were a pair so stultifyingly normal that they might have evaded detection forever had it not been for a lapse in security on the part of another member of the ring. The Krogers, as they called themselves, were a couple originally from New Zealand, or so they said, living in Ruislip and behaving in a thoroughly unexceptional manner. Mrs Kroger had cordial relations with the neighbours, went to meetings at the WI, and baked cakes. She was also very good at the latest in secret technology, especially the microdot, state of the art at the time, and never once dropped her false identity, even when caught, as it were, red-handed. She was actually from the United States and said to have been a friend of the Rosenbergs.

Mrs Wyatt disappeared from her children's lives on the very day that the Krogers were exposed and Peter concludes that she might herself have been part of a similar ring, called "home" before she was arrested. He devotes himself to mastering all the lore of spycraft, both real and fictional, trying to work out some way of finding the truth, perhaps in the hope of retracing her flight and reuniting with her. He closely resembles the hero of a boy's adventure novel except that, unlike those figures of fantasy, he does immense damage to those around him in his obsession.

Anna is compelled to go along with him, but only when he is home from boarding school, where even before his mother's disappearance, he had been bundled off to at the traditional age of eight. He might be a different child at school, where he is bullied for having a foreign mother, but at home he bullies his sister into cooperating with his search to prove his mother a spy (but not a traitor: "You have to be British to be a traitor"). Left very much on her own, with no strong female presence to serve as a model, Anna is less intrigued with the "how" of spycraft than with the "what" of identity. If you were forced to become someone else, what became of the person you had been? If a woman had a husband, children, were they merely a disposable part of her cover, left behind without a thought when it was time to become someone else?

In her 50s, with her own daughter in university, Anna finally goes to Poland and to Russia to see what she can find out about her mother. She has pathetically few facts at her disposal - a city, Kőnigsberg, now Kaliningrad, a city whose entire previous German history has been erased and overlaid with a new Soviet identity, rather like the secret agents themselves. She has her mother's memories of the apartment house in which she grew up, her mother's name, and little more. Knowing neither German nor Russian, she is at a disadvantage that might have discouraged her brother at his most bloody-minded. But persevere she does and she finds out what there is to be found out. If it is not enough, it is something.

Harding provides us with much to think about here. Like Michael Frayn in SPIES, she reminds us of how children are affected by the larger social climate in which they are trying to grow up, which they can only partially understand. In this case, it is the generalized paranoia of the Cold War that provides the fuel for Peter's imagination as he tries to find an explanation for his mother's absence that is not his fault.

Readers anticipating a conventional revelation of "truth" at the end of the novel may feel a bit unsatisfied with Harding's conclusion. What we are left with is not a full stop but a trailing ellipsis, altogether appropriate to the questions of identity that the novel raises as well as to the ambiguities of the Cold War itself.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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