Fiction embroiled in the Profumo affair

Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Stephen Ward. William Nicholson has chosen to hang his seventh novel around it in Reckless, which takes place between the end of the second world war and the Cuban missile crisis.

Our hero, Rupert, is a quiet Englishman and aide to Lord Mountbatten. During the war he is invited to tea at Cliveden, where he meets the teenage Princess Elizabeth in the company of a Russian and an American; inspired by her gentle thoughtfulness, the three young officers vow a pact for there to be ‘no more wars’. The ensuing two decades intertwine the personal and the political as the world inches towards nuclear Armageddon.

As a much-garlanded scriptwriter, Nicholson is excellent at dialogue, and his eye for period detail is almost as good. Richard’s foil is the naive young Pamela, whose belief that her destiny lies in having ‘a great love affair… the kind of thing people write about in books’ is set up as a prelude to what happens when, thanks to Stephen Ward, she discovers the power of her beauty. Unlike her literary namesake, she is swiftly seduced by the rich, corrupt men she meets at Cliveden.

As Nicholson was shortlisted for last year’s Bad Sex Prize, it should be noted that his descriptions of sex in Reckless are both erotic and dismaying in that the reader is sharply aware that his heroine is being duped. Pamela’s narcissism and vulnerability make her compelling, and one would happily have read a novel just about her and Rupert, as the latter falls in love with Mary, an unhappy Irish postulant desperate to be rescued from convent life.