What is entirely Prescott's own is the story of Irina, and her fellow, more experienced, spy Sally Forrester. But again, is a brief namecheck at the end enough for novelists to pay credit to the tireless leg work of researchers and historians, without whom their own work could not have existed? Prescott acknowledges that this exhaustive work, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, was "an indispensable asset". This is a fascinating story, but it's also been told before, most comprehensively in 2014's The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, The CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. It was, Prescott writes, "the mission that would change everything.
#THE SECRETS WE KEPT CODE#
Banned in the east, it was given the code name AEDINOSAUR by the CIA. "Then there was Zhivago", is how the novel introduces what is, ostensibly, its central theme, 159 pages in. It's evident that those recruited by the CIA to translate books into Russian and spread them throughout the communist east for propaganda purposes had a genuine passion for literature as well as freedom, and the agency soon becomes "a bit of a book club with a black budget", with earnest exchanges going on for hours. These fearsomely intelligent women, many of whom undertook dangerous missions during the war, are suddenly relegated to the role of secretaries in peacetime, whilst mediocre men are promoted above them. It's been described as "a proto-feminist Mad Men set in the world of international espionage", a jingle which captures its flavour exactly. The pen portrait of the US capital during that period is seductive.
The sections of the book which feel most authentic are those set in Washington in the 1950s. Lara Prescott admits in acknowledgements at the end of the book that her novel contains "direct descriptions and quotes, including excerpts of conversations, as documented in first-hand accounts" but it's worth asking if that goes far enough to play fair with readers. There is some lovely writing here - as she is sent for the first time to Siberia, Olga gazes from the train as Moscow gradually disappears with the words "then come the trees, then the countryside, then snow, then snow" - but it also feels awkwardly novelettish in places. Has she actually added anything to Olga's story, or our understanding of it? Prescott has researched this history extensively, but her fictionalised retelling does feel a little second hand at times. it already has been, not least in a 2017 biography, Lara, by Anna Pasternak, granddaughter of Boris's sister. In interviews, Prescott describes her as "an incredible woman whose story deserves to be told." But the thing is. Olga was certainly a formidable individual in her own right, who would be sent to detention camps twice for her association with Pasternak. It's a solid piece of commercial fiction, though it does, after a promising start, take a while to get going but it's still something of a mystery why publishers were quite so excited when it landed on their desks. None of that ought to matter when it comes to reading her book - it either works as a novel, or it doesn't - but it's hard not to be influenced by those numbers. The thirtysomething Prescott could not have hoped for a better start to her career as a novelist. It has also been sold to a further 28 countries, whilst film rights have been snapped up by the producers of La La Land. The Secrets We Kept was acquired for more than seven figures in a hotly-contested auction, and is being launched as this summer's lead debut fiction title by the winning publisher, with 200,000 copies printed in the US alone.
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