Our Woman in Moscow

 Our Woman in Moscow

By Beatriz Williams

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

But the complex truth behind Iris’s marriage defies Ruth’s understanding, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet KGB officer forces them to make a heartbreaking choice between two irreconcilable loyalties.

I liked this, especially coming as it did when I was halfway through Left Hand of Darkness and the part where LeGuin muses that maybe with the removal of hormones we wouldn't have war or rape, and I'm rolling my eyes so hard. Sure, because both of those things are about sex and not power in any way... right.

So, Woman! I definitely have critiques, and there were a lot things that were either huge deus exs or me really not paying attention to the plot (and I'm pretty sure I followed the plot), but for a lightweight espionage thriller, it succeeds.  

First off, I would have ordered the book around completely differently.  We start at the end of the "extraction" and then go back in time, skipping from Ruth in '52, Iris in '40-'48, and Lyudmila in '52, getting in backstory and so on, but for real, the book is called Our Woman in Moscow and Lyudmila's first chapter concerns an agent passing information about Russian double agents back to the US/UK. It's not a stretch.  It's Iris!  Let's not be coy here.  I would have started with Sumner tracking down Ruth to extract Iris, up to the point that Ruth meets up with him again in Italy (or reorganized that whole section), then gone and spent the middle section with Iris, and actually spent time with her being a spy, and her fear when the other two (Philby and Maclean or whomever) showed up, and then backtracked to the extraction operation, so we really felt the stakes in the last section.  Here, it builds and loses steam in certain areas; and we skip over hugely important turning points (i.e., what the heck happened with Philip? Why did Sasha think he'd killed Philip but he clearly had not? I mean, were the Russians keeping that from Sasha, and if so, why? But also Iris apparently spent a bunch of time with him in the hospital, so where was Sasha for all this? And why was Iris in danger when Burgess and Maclean defected? Except that she managed to be safe for another year after they defected.  I just... did not follow that part.  You need to make it clear for stupid people!).

And there's a lot of semi-artificial stake-raising in the extraction chapters (Lyudmila knows the mole is the Digby family, but is foiled by her boss! Iris has to have a caesarean instead but it's all part of the plan! Lydumila's boss searches the apartment but finds nothing! Orlovsky's daughter is on vacation but then she spills everything! Everything is ruined! No, everything is proceeding!) and then we come to the biggest failure, in my opinion: the insertion of Lyudmila's daughter Marina as a vital plot point. First of all, if we're trying to achieve what weird coincidences turn fate (which I think ___ may have been going for, based on the afterword) I think we need to dwell a little bit more on than by Iris and Ruth after the rescue when they discover who Marina is. Second, it's fairly far fetched that this 15 year old, just happened to be good friends with the Digby/Dubinins, whose mother just happened  to be leading the counter-extraction, stole a motorcycle and drove to Riga and shot a guard (yeah, let that sink in) and it turns out to be the one person (the ONE) person whom Lyudmila wouldn't betray in an instant. 

And I don't think it needed to be there!  Let general paranoia and incompetence carry the day (as it did many times in the actual truth)! Let the stakes be the betrayal and choice of Sasha between his family leaving and the Communist party! Let's actually see the spouses confront each other on their covert activities and make Sasha face the prospect of going back to Russia having allowed his family to escape versus leaving the only happy life he's had.  

This makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the book.  Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy it! I just really wanted it to be ever so slightly different. 

I'm not even going to get into how everyone keeps harping on how Iris would never betray someone, only to turn right around and betray her husband (in several different ways).