Lea Carpenter

In a world full of overly long books, Lea Carpenter’s Ilium dares to use sparse language to tell a sprawling tale of love, war, and espionage. The young, unnamed female narrator finds herself at the center of a nearly decade-long operation after she falls in love with a mysterious older man. Carpenter manages to build complicated characters, and she masterfully doles out information with pinpoint accuracy as they head to the inevitable conclusion. Ilium is not an action thriller, but a slow, thoughtful book about the inside of operations and the people involved.… (altro)

Much like John le Carré’s spies, the people who inhabit this novel are edgy, flawed, and morally ambiguous. Carpenter provides much of the intrigue one expects in spy novels, but with themes that are more common in literary fiction. She seduces her readers into liking both sides, regardless of their willingness to commit despicable acts in the name of patriotism and revenge. Not unlike most fictional spies, these characters have a facile hold on truth and are adept at inventing and reinventing their identities. However, Carpenter gives them an attractive sense of humanity.

The unnamed protagonist/narrator is a middle-aged woman who is reminiscing about a past when she first was recruited to a life of espionage. At 21, she was a lonely naive young woman looking for adventure and romance. She found both with the charismatic Marcus, an older man who swept her off her feet and married her. Unfortunately, he had a life-threatening illness and a hidden agenda. Before he died, he recruited her to work with a skilled crew of spies to carry out a revenge hit on a “retired” Russian spy living in isolation with his family in a secure compound on Cap Ferret, a remote peninsula on the eastern coast of France.

Carpenter’s deceptively simple spy plot evolves into a romance and coming-of-age story when her narrator becomes enthralled by the Russian family she was recruited to spy on, especially its patriarch and his young son. Likewise, she is captivated by the consummate competence and humanity of the members of the CIA/MI6/Mossad hit team.

Using a confessional narrative tone, Carpenter widens her focus to multiple themes, including loyalty, revenge, friendship, family, loveless marriage, and parenthood. Notwithstanding its broad thematic focus, the novel maintains tension with the measured use of flashbacks that give the reader an understanding of plot elements that initially seem puzzling. Ultimately this genre-bending novel provides a satisfying reading experience.… (altro)