Changes

|title=Red Joan

|author=Jennie Rooney

|publisher=Chatto & Windus

|date=March 2013

|website=http://www.jennierooney.com/

|summary=A slightly different take on the spy novel genre that looks at the reasons why someone might be drawn into passing on information. With a set up based on a true story, Rooney makes her spy more morally complex.

}}

It is very obvious where Jennie Rooney has taken the idea for her novel ''Red Joan'' from. As she acknowledges fully, it has its origin in the 1999 story of Melita Norwood whose espionage for the Russians wasn't discovered until she was in her late 80s, but while Norwood was a dyed in the wool communist, Rooney offers a more complex back story to her character, Joan. The result is a very different type of spy novel than normal. Joan, a widowed grandmother, is going about her day to day life when MI5 come knocking on her door to ask about her past. The narrative switches between their questions to her and her recollections of her time at Cambridge in the late 1930s where communist feelings were, by some, given a more sympathetic ear. When Joan falls for Leo, the cousin of her Russian born friend Sonya, she gets dragged into a world that is dangerous and morally complex.

It's certainly more of a moral and psychological spy novel than an action packed one, and that is very much the book's strength. It's cleverly plotted and you are equally keen to hear about the past as about how the present day questioning is going. It also subtly asks if someone who has done a traitorous thing in exceptional circumstances is therefore a traitor forever.

There's plenty of choice when it comes to spy fiction, but for another slightly different take on the genre, [[Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan]] is also worth checking out.

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