EXPOSURE by Helen Dunmore (fic)

"Exposure" is one of the best books I read in the past year.  It has mystery, intrigue, interesting relationships, and the setting and time frame are intensely realistic.  Dunmore is a great storyteller.

When we first meet the Callington family, they seem to be living an ideal life. They have a comfortable, if not a cozy, home, children with a bright future, and they have seemingly secure jobs.  Simon works for the secret service and Lily is a teacher. It is 1960 and London's war years are being erased by new buildings and a rising economy. Dunmore conjures up this era perfectly with little details that a less gifted writer might miss.  But all is not as it should be.  Simon and Lily Callington have secrets of their own, secrets that are about to cause their lives to fall apart. These secrets are tangled up with the paranoia of the cold war years and as their story evolves, the known becomes unknown and terrifyingly sinister. As Simon says, " 'You tell yourself you've forgotten things, but you haven't.'  It's all there, under the lid he's crammed down on it since he met Lily."

As the novel opens, Simon's oldest friend, Giles Holloway who works with him, falls down and breaks a leg.  He subsequently receives incompetent care in hospital.  As his condition worsens, he asks a favor of Simon that has to do with top secret papers that Giles should not have had at his home.  Simon complies out of loyalty and past friendship.  Thus begins a downward spiral for Simon that is soon out of control and lands him in jail.  The reader discovers that the Secret Service department is still run like it was in the 19th century with martinets and petty jealousies and moles in every office. It brings to mind the era of Guy Burgess and the Cambridge spy ring.  There is one particular slimy character, Julian Clowde who makes it his mission to destroy the Callingtons.  The plot becomes much like a film noir of the 1940s. Like many of those movies, trains play a sinister role in the setting. Dangerous assumptions abound. The old boy network does not come off well here.

Simon is vulnerable because of his past.  Lily is the hero of the book.  She is left to salvage what she can of the family.  Her vulnerability lies in the fact that she is an immigrant from Germany, never mind that she is Jewish, she is still suspect as a spy by the pompous Julian Clowde.  Her world that she thought safe because she was married to a British aristocrat, folds as quickly as Simon's.  How and if Lily saves her family and home is not answered until the last chapter and pages of the book.

I highly recommend this engrossing book to all readers.  It is a thriller with a tight plot and characters who are multi-faceted and complex.  Along with all of this, it is a story of enduring love.