Lea Carpenter's third novel, Ilium, is a spy story, a romance, a coming-of-age record, and a tale of lost innocence told in an elegiac tone, with something for every reader to get lost in. Its opening chapter introduces a young woman boarding a bus in Central London, watched by a man from "a world far away." The rest is told from the point of view of the young woman. "There was a private garden near the house where my mother worked," she begins, describing a childhood of unfulfilled desires. She has grown up dreaming of this locked garden, of having access to exalted spaces, of being someone she is not. "What the garden taught me was that the allocation of keys in life isn't fair, that luck and happiness are not prone to reason or will." At age 20, she meets the garden's new owner, a man 33 years her senior, successful, charismatic, entirely independent, who sweeps her off her feet; they are soon married in Mallorca, and then he asks her for a favor. "All you have to do is listen," he says.
Carpenter's narrator (who remains unnamed, a nod to the clean absence of self that is part of what makes her attractive to her new handlers) is coached in her role. She is flown by helicopter to a lavish, elaborately casual estate on the French coast, where she is installed as the guest of a wealthy family at leisure. She poses as an aspiring art dealer; the fine art world does not serve as backdrop to a major plot point, but does provide some lovely details: "The oligarchs' relationship to Russia's various intelligence agencies is like the color blocks in a Rothko, a carefully calibrated blur." The mysterious and charming patriarch of her host family, Edouard, prizes his commissioned series of paintings based on Homer's Iliad, another of the plot's minor but rich threads. "You never want an operation to be personal but so many are, ask Achilles." The young narrator, now a spy, starts off almost laughably naïve, but her observations along the way, related in hindsight, are astute. The qualities that make her valuable to her shadowy new employer--loneliness, emptiness, openness, optimism, a tendency to romance--make her vulnerable to finding friendship where perhaps she should see danger.
Carpenter (Eleven Days; Red, White, Blue) assigns her narrator a winsome voice: innocence wearied by experience, but always clever, and sympathetic to all the players in a complex operation begun long before her birth. Ilium is an espionage thriller in its richly wrought and detailed plot; but its spotlight falls centrally on the narrator herself, whose yearning for a role to play earns her a bigger one than she could have imagined. The dreamy tone of this sparkling, riveting story sets up a memorable counterpoint to its intrigue. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: A lonely young woman falls in love and finds herself at the center of a spy mission in this mesmerizing, moving story about different kinds of seduction.