Win 1 of 5 copies of The Long Room

The Long Room, Francesca Kay
Faber & Faber, $33
It’s London, 1981 and well-mannered piano teacher Helen has no idea she’s being watched. Or, more accurately, listened to. That’s because the person with his ear to her every conversation is a government spy who spends his working hours in a cloistered room with headphones clamped to his ears, pen poised, listening intently to the recordings of the bugging devices placed in her home.
It’s Helen’s husband – code name Phoenix – that ‘listener’ Stephen Donaldson is charged with spying on. But Stephen isn’t the least bit interested in Phoenix because along the way he’s fallen obsessively in love with Helen. The timbre of her voice, the sound of her quick footsteps, the way she cries after an argument with her husband… everything about her inflames the operative, who starts believing their “spirits are connected in unearthly ways that no mortal can explain”.
And so it is that Donaldson crosses the fine line from spy to stalker. With the agency threatening to pull the plug on the investigation, he must invent more and more reasons why Phoenix’s home should continue to be monitored – a path that leads to an unexpected and altogether satisfying crescendo. Francesca Kay unfolds the story cleverly, with astonishing attention to minutiae which undoubtedly mirrors the life of such a spy who must mull over each word and morsel of information in the search for clues and disguised meanings.
While Helen is an elusive character in the book – we know her mostly from snatches of bugged conversations, glimpses on the street and the sentimental fantasies of her stalker’s imagination – Stephen himself is a strange fish. He’s 28 going on 82, living an empty life outside of his work, complete with sour, grey bedsheets. Catch of the day? Not so much.
But it’s a rich and intriguing world that Kay builds around her characters, with the backdrop of the Cold War and IRA bombings. It’s a world where half-truths are more dangerous than lies – a lesson our stalker Stephen doesn’t learn until the bitter end.