
It’s 1939. A young British woman is shaken out of her dreary post-school existence when she is approached by M15 to join their counterintelligence unit and infiltrate a Nazi ring in London. Flash forward to 1949. The war is over but Evelyn, no longer a spy, is wracked with guilt that alludes to something terrible occurring all those years ago. What horrific thing happened that destroyed her career, her relationships, and her youth? And how will she break through her shame to save the first meaningful adult relationship she has had, before it’s too late?
With a premise this compelling, The Imitator promises to be a more literary James Bond, with a feminist undertone and gripping pace.
The debut novel by Rebecca Starford, co-founder of literary journal Kill Your Darlings and a talented nonfiction writer, The Imitator lives up to these expectations. It’s a fast-paced tale with plenty of plot twists and enough complexity to place it somewhere between a historical genre novel and a literary thriller.
Starford’s dedication to research means the historical details of the novel are sharp and clear, down to the clothing, hats, interiors and even the language used. The political thread running through the book is subtle but distinct: the women are complex, brilliant characters, hindered by their gender; the men are good, bad, predatory and genuine in turn. This isn’t a didactic narrative designed to influence the reader’s allegiances and the characters avoid stereotypes.
Evelyn is a classic outsider, a scholarship student who attends a selective private girls’ boarding school, and there discovers the skill of fitting in, imitating the status quo to survive. This plot point could be drawn from Starford’s own experiences – her first book, Bad Behaviour, was a memoir about attending boarding school and the bullying within its walls. In The Imitator – through Evelyn’s close friendship with Sally Wesley, the daughter of rich button manufacturers, and her cousin Julia, an older girl with a dark edge – Starford further explores the nuances of female friendship including their uplifting potential and their ability to be all-consuming.
The narrative flashes between the late 1930s, when all three women have graduated from school, and university in Evelyn’s case, and a decade later, when their friendship lies in ruins. The reader is left searching for clues about what went wrong, and this, perhaps, is the biggest flaw of The Imitator. In trying to establish suspense and pace, the constant alluding to the tragedy that laid waste to Evelyn’s once promising future detracts from the events as they unfold. By the time the twist is revealed, it feels anticlimactic, if only because there is so much time between knowing something bad happened and the details finally being disclosed, that the reader has settled into speculating far worse scenarios and events.
In fact, the entire final third of the novel feels rushed, as revelation after revelation is made to the reader, and eventually neatly tied off in time for Evelyn to strike out with a renewed vigour for life, having in the course of one evening overcome the guilt and shame that shadowed the earlier parts of the novel.
Unfortunately, this does mar an otherwise well-constructed novel, which is full of strong imagery and deft scene setting. Starford’s depiction, for example, of the glitzy events hosted by Evelyn’s friends and the contrast with her mould-ridden bedsit helps set an atmosphere of longing and lonerism that provides depth and motive to her protagonist.
The attention to detail is impressive, with each scene carefully described so the reader feels the wonder and confusion of Evelyn as she befriends a Russian former aristocrat to infiltrate the Nazi ring, or is introduced to her first desk at the repurposed prison that doubles as MI5’s offices as they prepare for the war. You can practically smell the mould, the silver polish and the cigarette smoke wafting off the page.
War novels are a dime a dozen, but with a female protagonist who is embroiled in the dangerous underbelly of dissident London, The Imitator adds to the canon of texts that counters the traditional depiction of wartime women as simply holding down the fort while men go to battle.
This is, for the most part, a highly enjoyable novel, so it’s a pity the final chapters weren’t given more space to evolve.
• The Imitator by Rebecca Starford is out now through Allen & Unwin
