SARAH ARMSTRONG on The Language of Spies

 

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic, authority, truth, and the surveillance we are all exposed to.

 

There are some jobs which just seem to suggest spying. Among the most obvious is any position in a foreign embassy, and this is the association I drew on in my first Moscow Wolves novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt. My protagonist, Martha, has entered into a marriage of convenience with a diplomat working at the British Embassy in Moscow. Martha doesn’t work both because she doesn’t need to and because wives were not encouraged to. From a writing perspective, this freed her up to explore Moscow at her leisure, and allowed me to explore it too. Martha is never quite sure whether her husband, or any of his colleagues, are more than diplomats. What Martha never doubts is that at least one of them must be a spy.

 

This is an assumption which, like most speculation about spies, has been fed by novels and films. Autobiographies published by agents who have defected confirm that it isn’t a lazy stereotype, it is indeed based on fact. And yet, when it comes to the world of spies, as Mick Herron has exploited in his Slough House series, no one can disprove the facts you make up about spies. The world of spying is a closed one, and that allows writers all kinds of latitude.

 

For the sequel to The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I wanted to explore different types of work that might fit into the world of espionage. One of the first things I do when starting a new novel is to look up what happened in the year and place I’ve chosen. In 1975 Moscow was host to the Soviet International Film Festival. In The Starlings of Bucharest, I decided that my protagonist, Ted, would be an accidental film critic with aspirations to become a news reporter. A job as a reporter would be a useful cover for a spy but it felt a little too obvious, so I resisted giving Ted this job. Instead, the idea of Ted making a temporary visit to Moscow was a better solution as it provided a way to experience the city which contrasted directly with the months that Martha lived in her flat in the first novel. While researching the range of film festivals across Eastern Europe, it also struck me that being a film critic had huge potential for covert meetings and socialising with people from suspect places in a way which would often be difficult to observe. 

 

The film festivals of the 1970s were highly organised international affairs showing films from dozens of countries in dozens of languages. This meant that translators became a crucial part of the festivals too, and I found some fascinating pieces written by Elena Razlogova which discuss the simultaneous translations which enabled the Moscow International Film Festival, and other international festivals and film tours, to take place. Four of the translators that Razlogova discusses are her relatives, and this gives her discussion of live film translation some fabulous and telling details - often the film had not been seen before, let alone a script provided. The skills of great film translators were widely celebrated, but I was most interested in the power they held. Any translator sitting between two people who don’t share a language has the power to bend the conversation in any direction they like. And if one of the people does, in fact, understand what is being said by the other, the transfer of power becomes even more interesting.

 

In The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I introduced the idea of layers of communication, of someone secretly trying to communicate messages through the medium of fairy tales. The idea of hidden meanings within words is something which fascinates me. In The Starlings of Bucharest, the same power and influence comes from the ability to speak more than one language. In spy novels there are many ways to listen into conversations, with tapped phones and bugs in lampshades, but no one can spot and remove language skills. As superpowers go, it’s a pretty easy one to access, but one which many of use never bother to acquire. At least, that’s what we tell people. 

The Starlings of BucharestPublisher: Sandstone Press LtdPublication Date: 22/04/2021

The Starlings of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong - Reviewed by Adam Colclough

 

The Starlings of Bucharest

Sarah Armstrong

Sandstone Press, Pbk £8.99  April 22, 2021

Ted Walker a working-class young man with aspirations to be a journalist moves to London from the provinces in the mid-seventies. Down on his luck he takes a job with reviewing films for a magazine that seems forever one issue away from going under. Sent to Romania and then Moscow to cover the film festivals Walker finds himself immersed in the looking glass world of the Cold War. As a useful innocent both sides have plans to use him as a piece in a game he barely understands.

 

This is one of the most intelligent espionage novels I have read in the past couple of years. For once the comparisons Armstrong has drawn with le Carre is more than just reviewer’s hyperbole.

 

Like the master of the genre, she presents the spaying game as being anything but glamorous. There are no battles with super villains bent on world domination here, just a lot of grubby tail chasing that might produce a small advantage; then again it might just as well not.

 

Armstrong gives her central character a voice that is by turns touchingly naïve and strikingly observant of the action playing out around him. This is convincingly a story told by a young man just waking up to his capacity to make sense of what might be going on behind the surface of life.

 

She also describes the grimy and angst-ridden London of the seventies with an accuracy that means you can almost smell the Britain in decay. Her portrayal of life behind the Iron Curtain is equally grim, showing us a society in which revolutionary fervour of revolution has fossilized into inept bureaucracy. The reports written on Walker and his activities by the various agencies watching him are masterpieces of paranoid assumption that are both comical and alarming.

 

Anyone who thinks the Cold War spy novel sank without trace years ago weighed down by its own cliches should read the work of Sarah Armstrong and change their mind.

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review. 

Maria Butina: How to be a Woman and a Spy

Male and female spies are presented very differently. Male spies are represented as active investigators, professionals collating information in files, and handing coded secrets to each other. Male spies are intelligence agents.

Female spies are represented as domestic. They talk to people, gathering gossip and innuendo, and focus on making themselves attractive to men. Female spies are informers, maybe unaware of the importance of what information they pass on.

While writing my novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I was very conscious of the ways these gender lines are drawn within espionage. Set in 1973, it is the story of a young British embassy wife, Martha, who moves to Moscow with her new husband, Kit. Struggling to make sense of this restricted world, Martha is relieved to meet Eva, an ex-British citizen who has renounced her nationality to live in Soviet Russia. While Kit must disguise his homosexuality to be able to work in the masculine world of intelligence, Martha accesses a more marginal world - the world of women.

The old distinction between male spies as active and female spies as passive has long been challenged in literature, yet it still runs through the way real world spies are represented, just as strongly as when it was applied to Mata Hari or Kim Philby. Mata Hari is presented as making use of her body and men’s weaknesses to collect information, while Philby actively sought out intelligence which would undermine the British State to benefit the USSR. But is this an accurate explanation of a gender difference in spying, or it is lazy gender stereotyping? And could it explain the headline of an article about Butina in the New Republic (11/2/19), ‘The Spy Who Wasn’t’?

Maria Butina, in the vast majority of images found online (when not alone), is presented in the company of a man or men: Paul Erickson, Alexandr Torshin, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor Scott Walker and former Senator Rick Santorum. There are photos of her with David Keene, President of the NRA 2011-13, Jim Porter, President 2013-15, and but not Sandra Froman who was the second female President from 2005-7. Despite Froman’s invitation to Butina to attend the NRA Women's Leadership Luncheon in 2014, there is no visual evidence of them together. The Women’s Leadership Forum has the tagline ‘Armed & Fabulous’, which would seem to suit many of the photos taken of Butina posing with guns, but where are the photos of her with women?

The overwhelming association of Butina with men in positions of power certainly suggests the popular Mata Hari image of female spies, the objectified beauty who exchanges favours for information. This was also seen in the case of the ‘sleeper agent’, Anna Chapman where, again, ‘sleeper’ suggests cosy, passive domesticity. Lacking the bureaucratic authority of the official office, the file and the safe, the actions of these women are seen as hidden and devious. Yet it’s so close to how women are often presented that, for some, it raises the question of femininity - could a woman this beautiful really understand the consequences of her actions? Isn’t this all a terrible error?

Representing female spies as sexually motivated, gossip gathering, and directed by men

undermines the active role of women, and not just in the world of spying. Eroding the agency of women, and disregarding any guilty pleas in the case of Butina, appears to make some men more comfortable. Yet, as my character, Martha, shows, sometimes it’s women who have to make the big decisions when it comes to deciding who is a spy.

Sarah Armstrong is the author of The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt (Sandstone Press) – out now.

Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit - who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage. Out of her depth, Martha no longer know who can be trusted.

Books to Look forward to from Sandstone Press

February 2019

This thriller brilliantly evokes 1973 Moscow and a world of diplomacy and counter-espionage. Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit - who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage. Out of her depth, Martha no longer knows who can be trusted. The Wolves of Lennisky Prospekt is by Sarah Armstrong.

April 2019

Death at the Plague Museum is by Lesley Kelly.  Edinburgh is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic.  One Friday, three key civil servants working on Virus policy hold a secret meeting at the Museum of Plagues and pandemics.  By Monday, two are dead and one is missing.  Mona, Bernard, and their other colleagues at the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team set out to find the missing bureaucrat, their investigation bedevilled by political interference.  The museum has a few deadly secrets of its own.  But not to worry – Bernard is a card-carrying Museum member.

May 2019

July 1932. When a drowned man is found in a freight elevator in Haus Vaterland, the giant pleasure palace on Potsdamer Platz, Inspector Gereon Rath is called in to investigate. It's not that Rath hasn't problems enough. His hunt for a mysterious contract killer has been stalled for weeks, and his on-off lover, Charlotte Ritter, has just begun her probationary year with Berlin CID. The corpse in Haus Vaterland looks to be part of a series of murders whose trail leads eastwards to the Polish border - and beyond.  The Fatherland Files is by Volker Kutscher.

June 2019

Finer Things is by David Wharton.  London: 1963. The lives of a professional shoplifter and a young art student collide. Delia needs to atone for a terrible mistake; Tess is desperate to convince herself she really is an artist. Elsewhere in London, the Krays are on the rise and a gang war is in the offing. Tess's relationship with her gay best friend grows unexpectedly complicated, and Delia falls for a man she's been paid to betray. At last, the two women find a resolution together - a performance that is both Delia's goodbye to crime and Tess's one genuine work of art.