By Malcolm Knox
FICTION
Gabriel’s Moon
William Boyd
Viking, $34.99
An interesting bunch of writers, William Boyd. His 43-year publishing career has produced 18 novels and five short-story collections, screenplays, stage plays and nonfiction. He has adapted Ian Fleming (Solo), Evelyn Waugh (Scoop), Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson) and Anton Chekhov (Longing). He has adapted himself (A Good Man in Africa, his intense 1981 debut that he turned into a screenplay a decade later).
Born in Ghana and raised in Nigeria, Boyd’s touchstones have been colonial and post-colonial. The Graham Greene comparison is unavoidable, though without the religious and political undercurrents that make Greene such an unnerving, fascinating study.
William Boyd has written a novel similar to what he, Graham Greene and John le Carre have done before.Credit: Getty
With the variety of output has come a variety of quality. It’s hard to believe that the writer who gave us masterpieces such as Any Human Heart and Restless can also have delivered the frankly phoned-in Ordinary Thunderstorms. Boyd’s early short-story collection, The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’, is miles better than anything since. His reputation rests on his best, and on looking the other way from his worst.
Both poles bob up in Gabriel’s Moon, a Cold War espionage thriller of the accidental-spy variety set in the early 1960s.
Boyd’s latest novel is set in Africa and Europe during the Cold War.
Its protagonist, Gabriel Dax, is a travel writer drawn into political events when he is invited to interview Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dax soon finds himself out of his depth, circled by mysterious spies, including his brother Sefton and his handler and would-be lover, Faith Green.
The action moves through Africa to London and various European cities as Dax is used as a messenger and clueless collaborator. As he gradually tries to work out what is going on, subplots evolve: he sees a psychiatrist to resolve a childhood trauma around the death of his mother, and he has an affair with a working-class Londoner called Lorraine. When not being used by unseen forces, Gabriel works on his next travel book, about rivers.
So far, so Greene. A lot of wheels are in motion, and the reader can feel assured that they are in the hands of a master who will draw the whole thing to a skilled conclusion.
Often that is enough, and it will be enough for a comforting holiday read with just enough literary phrasing, historical insight and twisty plotting to lift it above the level of pulp. At no point would you say Gabriel’s Moon is a bad or mediocre novel, though it has its weak points. Dax’s affair with Lorraine seems like an older man’s indulgence, the class snobbery and sexism given cover because it is set 60 years ago. This is how things were, so let’s just enjoy it, I suppose.
The Lumumba plot – he was assassinated in 1961 – never gets beyond playing the role of a place-holder. Gabriel’s buried trauma is predictably sorted out. At the sentence level, there is also an unevenness of register. “The room was fogged with the smoke and his moon had a flocculent wavering halo.” Flocculent? On page two? Soon, there is more meat-and-potatoes description of women by their clothing and the psychiatric sessions are reduced to transcripts as if it’s not worth bothering with any more.
The unevenness wasn’t my big question, though. I kept asking why. If you are a writer with as much proof of excellence as Boyd, why write a book that is so similar to what you, not to mention Greene and John le Carré and the many masters and mistresses of the 1960s espionage novel, have done before? Is it just that genre fiction is having its day and what many readers want is something to pass the time? Maybe that’s a good enough commercial reason and Boyd has earned the name not to have to answer.
But I’m always puzzled when the finest writers supply product. The quest for relevance, I guess, is irresistible. Boyd has set himself a task with this book, and he achieved it successfully. It just felt, however, like a thing he did between his greater things.
Malcolm Knox’s most recent novel. The First Friend, is published by Allen & Unwin.
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