The Secret Lives of Emma by Natasha Walker

Walter’s heroine has to deal with something on a far grander scale than the petty perfidies of the war between the sexes. Outwardly, she is an unexceptional middle-class woman, with no hint of the dark secret she is harbouring. Our protagonist, Laura Leverett, is living a ghostlike existence in Geneva with her daughter, attempting to come to terms with the disappearance of her duplicitous husband in 1951. For Walter, the most stimulating aspect of the story is not so much the tensions of the Cold War, but addressed the battles that women have fought (and still fight) for equality, but this is an era when such battles were nascent, and her heroine has to deal with something on a far grander scale than the petty perfidies of the war between the sexes. The novel is inspired by the life of Melinda Marling, the American-born wife of Cambridge spy Donald Maclean, but it inhabits a different universe from that of such writers as John le Carré. But just how successful is this change of gears?

Those expecting such fare will be in for a surprise – if there is one genre A Quiet Life moves in, it’s the very different territory of the espionage novel, with its attendant betrayals. What would you expect of the first novel by the feminist writer Natasha Walter? Surely the author of such books as Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and The New Feminism might reasonably be expected to grind a few ideological axes in her fiction debut? A 21st-century take, perhaps, on Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room? A Quiet Life, by Natasha Walter The Borough Press, £14.99

The Secret Lives of Emma by Natasha Walker