The Starlings of Bucharest

Ted moves to London to get away from the working-class community he was born into. Hoping to train as a journalist, he slides into debt. Things look up when he is given the opportunity to go to Romania to interview an art film director and then attend a Moscow film festival. But others are watching him. And listening.

Set in the mid-1970s, this novel is a spy thriller that effectively portrays life in the Soviet Union in the middle of the cold war. The main character, Ted, is a young man who comes across as being incredibly naïve. Much of the book is set in Moscow, where Ted is sent by his editor to cover an international film festival. In the meantime, there are KGB representatives not only following him all over Moscow, but doing deep dives into his life in the UK.

The strength of this novel is very much the setting. The backdrop of Cold War-era Moscow is oppressive and chilling. The scenes set in the UK are equally evocative, portraying Ted’s impersonal and slightly squalid rooming house with a realism that is true to the era.

I found the book hard to get-into initially. There are a lot of secondary characters, all of whom are warning Ted off dealing with other secondary characters, and the setting of Moscow in the 1970s made for decidedly uncomfortable reading. As a reader it was difficult to know who to trust – but perhaps that is the point of a spy thriller.

Ted himself is a character I found rather hard to like, and I couldn’t decide if he was so obtusely naïve, he was completely oblivious to what was going on, or whether his dissatisfaction with his present life led him to make conscious choices. Either way, the choices he makes sometimes made it difficult to empathise with him.

I have to add a disclaimer, though, that the spy thriller is not my usual genre, so many of the conventions of this genre may have completely passed me by. Fans of Cold War-era thrillers may find much to like in this perceptively-written and evocative novel.