A woman becomes part of an espionage network after her husband's sudden death.
Let me confess that I don't watch a lot of spy movies or read spy novels because the plots are too much to keep up with. Please consider that information an extra endorsement for Ilium by Lea Carpenter, a spy novel that's blissfully accessible. Perhaps I clicked with it because it's much more than a spy novel; it's a story about identity and relationships of all kinds. While I took in the suspenseful narrative I also found myself having a lot of Carrie Bradshaw-esque questions about love. How well do we know the people we love? How much deception is okay? What happens when we don't know who to trust?
I hadn't anticipated those questions going in, but they soon arose. As the book begins, the unnamed 21-year-old narrator is about to marry a man named Marcus. He's twice her age, rich, learned, and adventurous. "'Sleep,' he would say to anyone who proselytized its merits, 'is the only thing that won't go to bed with me,'" the narrator recalls. His charisma is only heightened by his contradictions and quirks, like keeping a minister on his payroll despite never attending church. I could see myself falling for Marcus, and I could see it'd be a terrible idea to get swept up into his restless intensity and guarded ways. "Marcus was a lighthouse. And lighthouses never switch off," the narrator shrewdly says.
She slowly realizes that Marcus is involved in espionage—and now she is too. Marcus gives her crash courses on how to conduct herself to get information from targets. One thing he tells her is to act as if everything is familiar. That caveat extends to even the small details, like eating whatever she's served. Truthfully, I was more unsettled by that idea than anything else about spying. Would I blow my cover by not eating cucumbers? Could I still be a vegetarian? The narrator is content to do as she's told, trusting in the instructions given by Marcus and his contacts. When Marcus abruptly dies from an unnamed chronic illness, all she has left is her newly found espionage network and all she can do is go farther in. She's sent to a French beach house to gather intelligence on the patriarch of an extended family that summers there.
I loved the pacing of the novel, and I definitely felt the suspense build. The narrator learns more about her strange new world slowly, each revelation launching more questions. When she sneaks into her target's bedroom, she's surprised to find a photo of Marcus on his desk. Everyone intersects with each other, but how? Did her target really do all the bad things her handler claims? I spent much of the novel wanting to know who the good and bad guys were despite knowing that binary doesn't exist here. In Ilium, the characters are unreliable and so are their accounts of each other. Moreover, when people have been so deep in the espionage community for decades, who even are they?
While Carpenter acknowledges that identity is slippery, she gives the characters compelling personalities and mannerisms. I grew fond of Elouard's obsession with the Iliad and how Raju plunges his hands into his pockets and looks like a kid. With these details, she lets the "normal" world intersect with the espionage world, which makes the book more real. At the same time, it highlights the strangeness of the people the narrator meets at the house she infiltrates, like a woman who's never eaten a cupcake.
My main quibble with the novel was the required suspension of disbelief: how could the narrator suddenly disappear into this world without any traces of her premarital life resurfacing? We learn about her childhood and meeting Marcus, but what happened in between? While she says she doesn't have close friends, I expected something from her former life to show up, even if it was just a returned security deposit or a postcard from an acquaintance.
However, I realize that great fiction is not often made from stories about returned security deposits. In the end, letting go of mundane expectations is the best way to enjoy this book.
Reviewed by
Erin Lyndal Martin
Good Morning America
Exquisite…
Ilium is like James Bond as told by the
New Yorker
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The tension of espionage, grief and ... longing ... come together in [
Ilium] ... Brilliant... . A work of dazzling eloquence and sensitivity.
Shelf Awareness
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. 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.
Vogue
Reminiscent of the spare, strobe-lit storytelling of the late Joan Didion, Carpenter shows how wealth and sophistication paper over moral rot and how human attachment is a vulnerability when only posing and posturing keep you alive.
Chris Bohjalian, The New York Times
Lea Carpenter clearly knows the world of espionage well ... Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs ... Moral ambiguity ... seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feel real to everyone around you. It's also what makes
Ilium such an unexpectedly moving novel.
The Washington Post
A lonely young woman yearning for travel, risk and excitement is swept off her feet by an older man who lives the life of her dreams... . In this literary spy novel, Carpenter considers whether it is possible to be on different sides of a war yet still embrace a shared humanity.
Booklist (starred review)
Refreshingly cerebral, literary, and cunningly cinematic ... [
Ilium is an] exploration of personal moral ambiguity playing out in the world of international intrigue.
BookPage (starred review)
Ilium is a masterful literary novel posing as a spy novel, and succeeds brilliantly on both levels.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With its dreamily detached narration and elliptical feel, Carpenter's third novel ... is less interested in spy vs. spy ... than the lack of reliable truths in people's lives and the ways they allow themselves to be formed by events beyond their control... . An edgy confessional novel with the trappings of spy fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Much of the story is framed as the narrator's reflection on her long-ago induction into the 'secret world' as an unwitting pawn, and while Carpenter wrings some pathos out of that conceit, her narrative elides too much and holds readers at too great a remove to truly captivate.
Chris Pavone, author of Two Nights in Lisbon
Here is the beating heart of a great espionage novel: devious manipulations and moral ambiguity within intimate relationships, with life-or-death consequences.
Ilium delivers it all, plus glamorous international settings, complex characters, and sparkling prose. A tremendously satisfying read.
Christopher Bollen, author of The Lost Americans
Ilium goes well beyond offering an exciting take on espionage literature. Lea Carpenter has built an entirely new wing onto the genre. Intricate, propulsive, rendered with deft emotion, this female-centric spy story has a deeply human heart.
Lisa Taddeo, author of Animal
Spellbindingly-plotted and told in frank, elegant prose,
Ilium is a beautiful book about love and war and innocence lost. Carpenter's depiction of espionage is captivating, while the questions the novel surfaces about identity are perfectly devastating.
In Lea Carpenter's Ilium, some of the spies have escape and evasion maps. Also known as escape maps or silk maps, these are scarves imprinted with maps that intelligence officers and soldiers have historically used when they've ended up behind enemy lines. They offer information about how best to escape or at least find somewhere safe to hide.
