The man who had to teach himself to lie

In the claustrophobic cul-de-sac in which Stephen grew up, secrets are rife. Stephen and Keith meet secretly to observe his mother Mrs Hayward, who is having a secret affair with Uncle Peter, who has secretly returned from the war. Beyond this, Geoff and Deirdre have secret rendezvous, the Wheatleys have secret German-Jewish blood, and Stephen and Barbara also kiss secretly. Despite the physical closeness of the neighbours, untruths and hidden feelings drive a wedge between them - though in some cases, secrets draw characters closer too.

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Memory lends a bittersweet perspective to Stephen's childhood exploits, which had a context he was incapable of understanding at the time but has acquired with age. The memory of Mrs Hayward's affair coincides with the memory of his adulthood beginning - his witnessing of Uncle Peter's dying days and his first experience of sexual desire. There is a clear nostalgia, near the end of Stephen's life, for a world without the complications of adult emotion, where everything was rationalised by simple, childlike explanations - a simplicity only possible before the events he recalls.

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War is a background presence in Spies which seems to hardly affect the children, but it is always between the lines. From the sky, streaked with flares and searchlights, to the bombed house in the middle of the Close, to the bayonetA blade that can be fixed to the end of a rifle. that Mr Hayward wears on his belt, war is an often unspoken but omnipresentAlways present. force. But the boys do not understand how deeply the war affects those around them. They catch on to the paranoia surrounding them (including the Haywards hiding their cars in the garage, wheelless, to prevent it from being stolen by the Germans), but are incapable of understanding the scope of war's trauma. This explains why they identify Mrs Hayward's absent, glamorous strangeness as "Germanness" - everything that provokes curiosity or suspicion, in their mind, is attributed to the Germans.

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The force of the boys' imagination is a source of comedy in the novel. Their absurd explanations and misinterpretations show the strength and vibrancy of children's imagination. And yet although the boys' explanation for Mrs Hayward's strange behaviour - that she is an undercover operative - is absurd, it is no less absurd than the reality, which is that she is hiding a passionate love affair with an escaped but honoured military man on the run in a grimy field. This shows that the line between the bounds of imagination and the bounds of reality is exceedingly thin.

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Is imagination what makes us human? Hilary Mantel's gift for inhabiting the minds of people from other ages and cultures made her one of the most admired novelists of our time.

Childhood and coming-of-age are some of the major themes of Spies. Keith and Stephen are children at the beginning of the book, though it is narrated by the now elderly Stephen. The narrator and the reader co-conspire in understanding things that the two characters are unable to understand due to their immaturity, such as that the "x" written in Mrs Hayward's diary reminds her of her menstrual cycle, not of clandestine meetings with a secret agent, which creates humour. But their innocence is also an interesting lens for the plot: failing to interpret even the mundane, though quaint, activities of Keith's mother, the two spies are even less able to conceive of the immensity of emotion behind Uncle Peter and Mrs Hayward's love affair, or the tragedy of war.

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