Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.
Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation. But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.
William Boyd has been one of literature's great purveyors of what you might call the thumping good yarn ever since his first novel, 1981's A Good Man in Africa, cannily updated Evelyn Waugh's distinctly un-woke but hilarious fiction for a contemporary audience. Ever since then, his superbly written, ceaselessly engaging books remain some of the most reliable pleasures to be found on any bookshelf, anywhere. Over the past few years, Boyd has settled into two main modes of storytelling. The first is the so-called whole-life novel, in which he follows an individual over the course of their entire existence; a literary form that he pioneered with 1987's The New Confessions, perfected with his 2002 masterpiece Any Human Heart, and has since revisited several times, most recently in 2022's The Romantic. And the other is the spy novel, which Boyd, for my money, does as well or better than any living writer.
Gabriel's Moon, the first in what Boyd has suggested will be an ongoing series, is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school, although there is nothing old-fashioned about the pace and vigor with which this particular story unfolds. Indeed, at times, the rat-a-tat-tat speed is almost disconcerting, rather like being tossed about uncontrollably on a rollercoaster. In the first few pages alone, we are introduced to the protagonist Gabriel Dax as a child, shortly before his house burns down, killing his mother, and from which conflagration he escapes only by blind luck. When we next meet Dax, he is a well-respected writer, on assignment in the Congo to interview its new president Patrice Lumumba. The idealistic politician talks of democracy and a bright future for his country, so inevitably he ends up assassinated under the auspices of untrustworthy foreign powers. And, as Dax is one of the last people to have seen Lumumba alive, his interview tapes are of enormous interest to these untrustworthy foreign powers.
Graham Greene's morally compromised characters inhabited a world that was known as Greeneland, no matter where the novels were set, and so there is a similar familiarity to Boyd's superbly crafted milieu. (Let's call it Boyd-watching.) He has always been the most playful and allusive of modern storytellers, so it's no surprise that a dubious CIA agent goes by the pseudonym of Raymond Queneau, any more than the conversations between Dax and his therapist smoothly move into film-script dialogue: a reminder that Boyd is, in addition to being a first-rate novelist, a highly accomplished screenwriter as well.
One of the great pleasures of his "whole-life" books has been the way in which Boyd adroitly mixes fact with fiction, and so it proves here. From the introduction of Lumumba onwards, this is a world in which real-life characters mix with people who ought to have existed, so convincingly do they emerge from the page. And Boyd's playfulness—something that once saw him write an entire monograph, Nat Tate: An American Artist, about a forgotten painter, which in turn convinced the New York art scene that he must have existed—extends to providing a bibliography for Dax at the back of the book. But the whole frowzy '60s milieu of a slightly run-down flat in Chelsea, cheap restaurants that serve indifferent food and buckets of drinkable wine, and nothing quite working properly is evoked with economy and style to spare.
Boyd excels in depicting the complexities of human relationships, and the one at its heart, between Dax and his MI5 handler, Faith Green, is particularly compelling. Dax becomes obsessed with the older, sophisticated woman, who recruits him into espionage through a combination of bribery and coercion, and the dynamic that emerges between them, in which mutual suspicion jostles with intellectual one-upmanship and lust, is a fascinatingly drawn one. You can almost smell the perfume, the cigarette fumes, and the sweat, and the cliffhanger ending leaves this particular danse macabre with plenty of mileage left to run.
Gabriel's Moon is a relatively concise book, at 263 pages, but it packs a lot in. At times, I wished that its breathless pace would slow down a little. This is, in part, a feature of its wide, almost overwhelming, cast of characters. Boyd introduces us to the intriguing figure of Dax's uncle and guardian, the flamboyant, womanizing antiques dealer Aldous, and then gives him virtually nothing to do for the remainder of the narrative. I caught myself wondering if he couldn't have been usefully combined with the other flamboyant, hard-living mentor figure, Kit Caldwell, MI5 bureau chief and Kim Philby stand-in, who is splendidly entertaining and responsible for some of the novel's most devilishly ingenious twists. And sometimes the book's towering cleverness overwhelms it; the final revelation as to what caused the fire that destroyed Dax's home is decidedly underwhelming, given that most perceptive readers will have long since guessed its secret.
Yet these flaws are minor compared with the novel's far greater successes. I read the majority of it on a business trip to Paris, flicking through its pages with enormous enjoyment as I dined on escargots and steak frites, sipping a glass of claret as I devoured the food and Boyd's narrative with equal pleasure. There are wonderful self-contained sequences that unfold with Hitchcockian precision, such as a sequence in which Dax heads to England's east coast in pursuit of Faith and a cat-and-mouse game ensues in which it is teasingly unclear as to who is going in search of whom. I laughed a lot—the description of Caldwell's "Hitlerian lock of grey hair falling over his brow"—is a perfect character introduction. And the surprises and twists keep coming.
You finish the book thoroughly sated, but slightly frustrated. Were it a box set, you would want to jump immediately to the next season, so it is to Boyd's great credit that it is with some impatience that all I want to do is read the next installment and await the further adventures of Gabriel, Faith, et al., with almost indecent eagerness.
Gabriel's Moon
by William Boyd
Atlantic Monthly Press, 263 pp., $28
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin's Press).