Lea Carpenter's third novel, Ilium, is a spy story, a romance, a coming-of-age record, and a tale of lost innocence told in an elegiac tone, with something for every reader to get lost in. Its opening chapter introduces a young woman boarding a bus in Central London, watched by a man from "a world far away." The rest is told from the point of view of the young woman. "There was a private garden near the house where my mother worked," she begins, describing a childhood of unfulfilled desires. She has grown up dreaming of this locked garden, of having access to exalted spaces, of being someone she is not. At age 20, she meets the garden's new owner, a man 33 years her senior, who sweeps her off her feet. Then, he asks her for a favor. "All you have to do is listen," he says.
Carpenter's unnamed narrator is coached in her role. She starts off almost laughably naïve, but her observations along the way, related in hindsight, are astute. The qualities that make her valuable to her shadowy new employer--loneliness, emptiness, openness, optimism, a tendency to romance--make her vulnerable to finding friendship where perhaps she should see danger.
Carpenter (Eleven Days; Red, White, Blue) assigns her narrator a winsome voice: innocence wearied by experience, but always clever, and sympathetic to all the players in a complex operation begun long before her birth. Ilium is an espionage thriller, but its spotlight falls centrally on the narrator herself, whose yearning for a role to play earns her a bigger one than she could have imagined. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia