Helen Dunmore: Author talks Exposure

That era – which was at its height in the 1950s and 60s – is the backdrop for Yorkshire-born novelist Helen Dunmore’s latest book Exposure.

Set in London in 1960, it is a beautifully written, gripping spy thriller that elegantly interweaves espionage, secrets, lies and betrayal on both a political and personal level. At the novel’s centre is Lily Callington whose husband Simon is arrested, accused of using his position at the Admiralty to pass information to the Soviets.

A sensitive file has gone missing and Lily believes that Simon is being sacrificed in a cover-up to protect others in positions of power. The trouble is that, it turns out, Lily doesn’t know her husband as well as she thinks she does.

“I have always been fascinated by the Cold War – it was such a complex era and I have written about it before,” says Dunmore, whose 2012 novel The Betrayal was set in Soviet Russia in 1952.

“Exposure begins in 1960 before what we think of as the Sixties 
had really begun and the shadow 
of the Second World War is still there. Everybody was affected by the war and that has shaped their lives – but nevertheless there was also a sense of optimism with the establishment of the NHS and the Welfare State. I really wanted to go back to that time when there was smog and privation, spy scandals and sex scandals.”

A number of key characters in the novel are gay men who because of their sexuality – which was still illegal in the UK at the time – are vulnerable to blackmail.

“That was very much a part of the spy scandals of that era,” says Dunmore. “Gay men were at risk from the law and that caused a fear of exposure – we forget that if you were found out you could lose everything – your job, your family and friends.”

Those men were forced to, in effect, live a lie every day and a major theme of the book is what remains hidden; the idea that it is almost impossible for one person to really know another.

“I very much wanted that to 
come across,” says Dunmore. “We all have secrets and we all have elements of our pasts that we hide from others and even from ourselves. We are all mysteries to each other – and in Exposure everyone has a secret, everybody is hiding something.”

Even Lily, a seemingly archetypal 1960s British housewife, part-time teacher and mother of three, has a past that she talks to very few people about. Having fled Nazi Germany as a child with her Jewish mother, leaving her father behind, she has deliberately erased any memory of her native language and has made every effort to become English.

“Lily had to learn when she was very young that people are not to be trusted and that your whole life can be shattered very quickly,” says Dunmore. “That has happened to her once and she knows it can happen again, so that’s why she is a bit of a she-wolf when it comes to protecting her own family. She is very observant and quick-witted. Her fear drives her. She knows what fear is and she acts.” As a result, by the end of the book, Lily will have more secrets she has to keep.

Dunmore says she did a lot of research on the period – in particular reading up on the spying activity of the time, such as the infamous Portland spy ring which was operating out of an ordinary-looking house in Ruislip.

“I wanted that sense that these were people who were living in suburban streets,” she says. “And I also wanted to be clear that real lives are being destroyed because of their actions. The drama is in the tension over who is going to be betrayed or abandoned and who is going to be saved?”

Exposure by Helen Dunmore, published by Hutchinson, £16.99.