Exposure
London 1960. Simon Callington is a relatively junior civil servant, working in naval intelligence. He has a German-born Jewish wife, Lily, who was brought to England as a child to escape the Nazis, and three children. His life is turned upside down when a senior colleague from the Admiralty, Giles Holloway, telephones him from a hospital bed to collect a highly classified file from his apartment. It is clear that Holloway is spying for the Soviet Union and photographs top secret intelligence. He has had a drunken accident in his apartment, and needs Simon to take the incriminating evidence away. Simon and Giles have a past – they had a homosexual relationship while Simon was studying at Cambridge. When Simon sees the file, he realises that something very serious is afoot, and that he could be in deep trouble. Indeed, Simon is soon in an invidious position, and it becomes clear that with his homosexual background he is vulnerable to being the fall guy for the spies when the fact that the file is missing is exposed. And then Lily finds the file in their home and buries it in the garden of their London home. Simon is arrested, charged with espionage, and remanded in a London prison; it all gets rather unpleasant for everyone, including the hospitalised Giles.
Dunmore writes with consummate skill and narrates the story beautifully. Her books are superb visions of what life can be like, with minutely and accurately observed descriptions of human behaviour and emotions that both afflict and beguile us. The rather baleful, but often shabby, bureaucratic world of intelligence is analysed precisely. This book is simply a delight to read.
