A spy's biggest mission may be investigating herself in novel 'Ilium'

A British spy narrates Lea Carpenter's latest novel, a work of dazzling eloquence and sensitivity. The prose demands that readers pay close attention — not because there are confusing leaps or twists, but because the slightest detail or gesture conveys so much information. The writing is controlled but not cold; on the contrary, Carpenter allows the narrator great sweeps of emotion that are some of the novel's finest passages.

The opening chapter, "London," written in third person, offers a glimpse of the future spy before her recruitment. "[S]he had no idea she was being watched," Carpenter writes. As for the man watching her, "He had learned why she had been chosen."

There are multiple reasons — among them, she has no strong family attachments ("'Espionage loves an orphan,'" a colleague tells her). For another, she bears a convenient resemblance to a key person. There is also this seemingly insignificant detail: She is observed tracing "the outline of a heart on her fog-stained window. From this simple act he drew several conclusions. She was a romantic, a dreamer, an optimist. She was interested in love. She was open to experience."

The novel, too, is interested in love. The narrator's marriage to Marcus, a wealthy man many years her senior, is not tarnished, in retrospect, when she learns how little she knew him, nor when she grows to understand his role in her recruitment. Once she has agreed to work for the CIA, she realizes she has met some of her new colleagues before; indeed, they were guests at her wedding, sporting other identities. When her husband's friend Raja recruits her, he says, "I don't think ordinary life is your style, my friend. ... Ordinary girls don't accept offers to spend their days pretending to be someone they are not."

This comment hovers over the novel.

When her husband dies and the narrator learns she is pregnant with his child, the fact becomes part of a fiction. To support the espionage, a new story must be written: The baby is supposedly Raja's, the result of their (fabricated) affair. The blurring of these boundaries between truth and invention is fascinating; instead of resisting it, the narrator directs her questions inward.

"Did Raja love me?" she wonders. In an instance of Carpenter's precise use of punctuation, the narrator thinks, "And did I love him." She develops an affinity for the family that hosts her on their compound in France — the same family on whom she spies.

Though the threat of violence is omnipresent on the compound, and violent history is implied, Carpenter leaves most of it off the page. The recruit is a participant, ultimately, in someone's act of revenge. In another moment of ambivalent self-reflection, she looks in a mirror. A brief sentence follows. "This is my real life," Carpenter writes, calling the reader to wonder how much the narrator believes her own act.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Ilium

By: Lea Carpenter.

Publisher: Knopf, 220 pages, $27.