‘IF THE INVADER COMES’
A Season for Spies—A Lane Winslow Prequel
by Iona Whishaw
Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2025
$19.95 / 9781771514828
Reviewed by Bill Engleson
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My review copy of Iona Whishaw’s latest, A Season for Spies, arrived on a drizzly Friday afternoon. I was exhausted after two hours of pickleball, but my mind was incredibly alert. It was also the day that Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, so I was especially pumped. The arrival of the prequel only added to my exhilaration and after a shower (you probably don’t need to know that) I jumped right in.
Almost immediately I was in a London Blitz. The irony of the timing of reading this story and the just signed Middle East Peace Accord and the long overdue end of the horrendous bombing was not lost on me. Typically, when I am reviewing the work of others, or, for that matter, writing my own efforts, I am impacted by events of the day. They become almost a natural fragment of whichever narrative I am engaged with, and never more so than when I began to read A Season for Spies.
Early in, college student Lane Winslow, a talented novice linguist, gets drawn into her wartime journey as an interpreter. A short while later, she is offered a most unexpected, not to say unusual, assignment. It has spy written all over it. Spies and her grandparents, actually. She’ll head north to Scotland to rendezvous with someone (who it is exactly is somewhat vague but apparently someone who will aid in the effort to thwart Hitler) and then hightail it to her grandparents cottage for Christmas and a brief sanctuary.
Out in the street, with bombs likely on the way and her new assignment flipping about in her translator brain, her first thought: buy Christmas gifts for her grandparents.
Pretty damn considerate, I thought, what with war and espionage going on full tilt.
In any case, much of the story involves Lane’s journey north. Interspersed with her harrowing weather-wracked excursion are scenes set in and around her grandparents’ cottage, similarly weather-whooped, preparations for Christmas, and additional winter weather challenges including an uninvited interloper fork in the road.
As Lane journeys on her quest, and as we occasionally spend time with her grandparents, Whishaw (The Cost of a Hostage) offers a basket of observations of war conditions—what war was like for the denizens of the British Isles. Privation is plentiful and suspicion about strangers, palpable. Balanced against these daunting traits are numerous examples of goodwill and trust: food shared, gestures made, transportation afforded.
At one point there is a power outage in the grandparents’ abode. While not an uncommon occurrence, it serves as a reminder that winter is on its way and power outages are de rigueur. I am thankful, however, that I am not dependent on coal for warmth.
I confess that one discussion was especially uncomfortable for me, a notorious disparager of a particularly dreary root vegetable: “Oh, I know,” the woman said. “We’ll all be sitting in the Underground eating raw turnips if Herr Hitler keeps this up!”
On a more germane note, and definitely not vegetable-related, Lane wonders “where the ministry stashed all the road and railway signs. They’d been taken down all over the country to keep an invading army from finding its way anywhere.” This eye-opener struck me as having been a massive undertaking.
(Words/phrases I did not know. Imbedded in the narrative are a few words and phrases used by Whishaw that probably I should have known but was previously unfamiliar with. I offer them with little further explanation: Fug. Rumbled. Gaspers. Safe as houses. The airing cupboard. Gammon.
Niggles: “Gosh, I hope this isn’t that serious a niggle!” Lane exclaimed.
If I have a niggle with the novel, you know, a niggling criticism, there are a couple of times in the tale when coincidence is stretched. In thrillers, that’s not particularly unusual. Neither niggle detracts from enjoying this entertaining work. I will leave it up to the reader to agree with me or not.)
Final thoughts—
As a child of television in the 1950s and early ’60s and growing up on Vancouver Island, I frequently watched British Sunday Theater, a KVOS program broadcast from Bellingham. It set my cinematic compass.
As a reader and, as noted, a lover of classic British films, especially films that captured suspenseful moments from WW 2 and other engagements, I found A Season for Spies to be a delightfully delivered novel. Halfway through reading it, I was compelled to stop to rewatch the 1947 spy thriller, I See a Dark Stranger. This wonderful film has a tone not unlike the mood that Whishaw so elegantly inures into her prequel.
Other films from or about WW2 also come to mind. The 1956 spy movie, The Man Who Never Was and Mrs. Miniver, the 1943 Academy Award-winning masterpiece, to name a couple of many.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t reference Alfred Hitchcock and offered a nod to his 1938 classic, The Lady Vanishes. I believe he would enjoy reading A Season for Spies. Whishaw knowingly or unknowingly offers a coterie of plucky characters and scenes that the master filmmaker would have relished
Lastly, threaded throughout A Season for Spies is the ominous poster and message, IF THE INVADER COMES. Whishaw lets us know that the British Isles was on the brink of invasion, and, not to give too much away, the followers of the quisling fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, were solidly afoot.
Perhaps the times have not changed all that much.
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Bill Engleson is an author and retired child protection social worker. He was born in Powell River, raised in Nanaimo, resided in New Westminster for most of his adult years, and retired to Denman Island in 2004. He self-published his first novel, Like a Child to Home in 2013. Silver Bow released his second book, Confessions of an Inadvertently Gentrifying Soul, a collection of humorous literary essays, in 2016, and he published his second novel, The Life of Gronsky in 2023. A sequel, The Book of Gronsky, is scheduled for spring 2026. His story, “Roadside Reunion,” was included in the anthology Not the Same Road Out. Visit his website-blog here. [Editor’s note: Bill has reviewed books by G. Kim Blank, Hugh Greer, Daniel Wood, Luke Whittall, JG Toews, Jack Knox (Opportunity Knox), Jack Knox (Hard Knox), and Mike McCardell for BCR. He has also contributed an essay about the Dora Drinkwater Library on Denman Island.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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