Exposure by Helen Dunmore - review

Following news that Stonewall has named M15 Britain’s most gay-friendly employer, here’s a reminder of a time when homosexuality and espionage had a much more vexed relationship. Helen Dunmore’s 14th novel is a slow-burn thriller with echoes of the 1962 scandal in which an Admiralty clerk named John Vassall was lured into a “honey trap” by the Soviets, which led to fears of a gay spy ring at the top of the Royal Navy (now, incidentally, the 10th best LGBT employer).

Dunmore’s story centres on a scandal that wouldn’t make much sense now that gay government officials aren’t so susceptible to blackmail, but which captures the paranoia and patriotism of those times.

It’s 1960 and Simon Callington is a middling civil servant with a safe job at the Admiralty, secured for him by his older “friend” Giles Holloway. Simon ekes out a modest existence with schoolteacher Lily (a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany) and their three children in Muswell Hill. He desires little more than his wife’s cooking and a bit of trainspotting and has distanced himself from Giles, now a seedy lush who seeks consolation with young boys in nightclubs. But when Giles has an accident and calls on Simon for a favour, Simon discovers that his former lover is a KGB double agent, “batting for the other side in more ways than one”. By answering Giles’s call, the family man has implicated himself. Giles, smashed up in hospital, becomes “a lame duck” while Simon, locked up in prison, realises he’s “a useful idiot”.

The focus now shifts to Lily and the children, who are hounded by the press and forced out of their home. As so often with Dunmore, the real derring-do takes place in the domestic sphere. It is Lily, unaware of her husband’s student affair with Giles, who emerges as the heroine — as well as the Callington children, who develop a sideline in foraging sea coal.