William Boyd’s latest novel is a smoothly gripping read

Gabriel’s Moon is William Boyd’s eighteenth novel, swiftly following last year’s The Romantic, which delightfully described the adventures of a man living through the nineteenth century in Europe. Though Boyd relates a smaller section of his new hero’s life here, many of his characteristic themes are fully at play: surveillance, deception, honor, love, art, fraud, real historical characters jostling with fictional ones, and relationships between mothers and sons. Essentially, this new book is a spy story, well within the lineage of John le Carré (complete with liberal ambivalence about duty to one’s country), and with skillfully handled layers of double-dealing. “The world was full of charlatans,” muses a character at one point; and indeed this cynical view is what Boyd’s protagonist Gabriel Dax comes to realize, as he progresses from ingenu to fully-fledged operator.

Gabriel — the angelic name is significant, as initially he’s very much an innocent — is a typical Boyd hero: educated at a minor British independent school and afflicted with wanderlust, he is a successful travel writer, as well as something of a layabout. He’s conducting an affair with a (slightly generically drawn) fast-food restaurant waitress (breaking down those class barriers, you see: it is the 1960s, after all), and mopes about from country to country as it suits him.

Boyd enjoys poking fun at Gabriel’s overly lush writing: “The broad valley lay before me, swart and dry, baking silently in the gold radiance of the dying day,” very much at odds with his own clipped and precise style. This, perhaps, is a non-plashy nod to Boyd’s great hero Evelyn Waugh and the similar parodies of overblown style in Scoop. Still, Gabriel’s readers don’t seem to mind — his books are bestsellers. (Is Boyd teasing the reading public too?) His older brother, Sefton, is a typical upright, pipe-smoking Foreign Office civil servant, living in a large house in North London with his wife and two children, providing an image of the successful home life Gabriel is avoiding. Though he visits his brother regularly for Sunday lunch, the two are emotionally distant, a result of the tragedy that begins the novel: their family’s farmhouse burned down when Gabriel was six, killing his mother and almost killing him; Sefton was away at boarding school. Their father was already dead, so the fire left them orphans. Despite this, they both appear to be leading normal middle-class lives, with Sefton as the “sensible” older sibling, and Gabriel the charming prodigal.

Gabriel’s journalistic job allows Boyd to bung his hero into various beautifully evoked places, from the Congo to a dusty Spain and a grim Cold-War era Poland, as well as the dirty London streets and the Suffolk countryside. Gabriel is relatively famous, and thus is often recognized, which provides a handy set-up for the plot: is Faith Green, a woman he meets on a plane, holding Gabriel’s book because she really likes it? Or was it all planned? Boyd keeps us guessing as Gabriel is swiftly drawn into the shadowy world of the secret services. If any- thing, in the early parts of the novel Gabriel is a little too passive, simply letting events happen to him.

But there are two main strands of investigation which provide impetus for the reader. In the first, Gabriel slowly works out exactly what he’s got himself into; in the second he excavates the past, trying to understand the causes of the fire. This process of digging is key: Gabriel also visits a psychoanalyst, who helps him understand that he needs to establish facts in order to confront the past. With these tools, as well as his journalistic skills, he can delve deeper into the world of espionage.

Many things are buried, literally and metaphorically. Among the first are some tapes on which Gabriel recorded an interview with Patrice Lumumba (the communist prime minister of Congo), just before he was killed in 1960, and on which are the names of his assassins, who are linked to some seriously important people. The tapes are hot property, and as Gabriel is the only person who knows where they are (beneath a bush in his garden), he becomes a marked man. Among the metaphorically buried things are the truth about the farm’s conflagration and the reality of the secret services’ motives. The act of recording is also significant to the novel: Gabriel’s sessions with his psychoanalyst are taped, helping to create an uneasy atmosphere of paranoia, where everything is noted down and potentially dangerous.

Another crucial metaphor is the moon of the title: it refers to Gabriel’s nightlight, a candle that burned in a moon-shaped globe by his bed. Gabriel is told it’s what caused the fire at the family farm, and his guilt manifests in insomnia and dreams of conflagration. But Gabriel also moons about after women, seeking the mother-love that he never had, and even taking on the attributes of a stalker as he obsessively begins to follow Faith Green. The moon’s rays, of course, illuminate deeds done in darkness, and provide a cold counterpoint to the flames that engulfed Gabriel’s early life. Not all the metaphors are quite so elegant: Gabriel’s London flat is beset by mice, and he tries to trap them as he himself is being tricked and manipulated. Mr. Boyd, we get the point.

The idea of manipulation, though, is an interesting one. Gabriel quickly understands that he is little more than a puppet. As Boyd manipulates his characters throughout their troubles, so Green manipulates Gabriel. It’s his attempts to break out of this and attain his own agency that, at last, endow him with a bit of backbone, which propel him throughout the latter parts of the book.

The plot seems at first straightforward: Green asks Gabriel to pose as an art dealer — his flamboyant uncle Aldous conveniently happens to be one, so he’s got good cover — and buy a drawing from Blanco, a gay Spanish painter, before delivering it to a contact, Caldwell. He’s never quite told the full picture (excuse the pun), but he does his job well and is asked to do more. But things get complicated, and the pace picks up after this assignment, as we enter into comfortingly familiar spy story territory.

Although, post-Slow Horses, some of this may seem tame, the joys of reading a new Boyd are in the consummately evoked details. The sections set in Spain are particularly well-handled, with the dusty roads and poverty of General Franco’s country springing to life. The seedy half-world of spies is brilliantly recreated: the heroin addicts picked up by agents to perform minor tasks, the impenetrable codes and signals, the briefings and counter-briefings, the mind-bendingly complicated ruses worked out to the tiniest point. Boyd cleverly works on us readers, performing many sleights of hand, which force us to question whether we agree with Gabriel’s actions or not. Our sympathies with him are thrown into question at least twice.

Not only are various people looking for the tapes which reveal Lumumba’s assassins, but there’s also a “termite” in the British service passing information to the Russians. Green tries to work out who is undermining them, as Gabriel equips himself with spycraft, taking to the job with (almost suspicious) ease. The trail brings him uncomfortably close to home. Meanwhile, the Cold War hangs heavily in the background, with nuclear missiles going missing: there’s a very effective section during the Cuban missile crisis, where Gabriel notes down what he hears people saying on the streets about possible nuclear disaster. It’s chilling.

The female characters are ciphers. When Gabriel isn’t enjoying wild sex with the waitress, he’s fantasizing about (and stalking) the icy Faith Green, whose name, too, resonates, as it’s always unclear whether Gabriel can trust her or not. Faith does have a little more depth than some, but is still essentially a dream of a woman. Most of the other male characters, too, are little more than cut-outs, fulfilling their functions briskly enough: a sinister American spy bearing the pseudonym Raymond Queneau, a posh publisher called Inigo.

Gabriel is a tad more fully developed; he has serious qualms about the more dangerous aspects of his job, and he does display honorable behavior of a sort. Nevertheless, he likes a lady in a fur coat, a fast car and a good bottle of wine; and he likes the extra money that his secret work brings in. Many ominous signs warn him to leave the world of espionage. However, unlike the mouse he sets free from its trap, he’s stuck in it.

What’s interesting is the choice of Gabriel as protagonist. Both Caldwell and Green have fascinating and complicated back stories, economically conveyed in a few paragraphs: the homosexual Caldwell is a globe-trotting agent, charismatic and potentially dodgy, who’s led a life of intrigue; Green, who lives a double life, with a “respectable” quantity surveyor fiancé, has also sustained serious trauma through wartime torture. Both lives would potentially have provided more interest- ing material. So why did Boyd plump for Gabriel?

The reason, I think, is that his metamorphosis from cheery man-about-town to ruthless killer provides a springboard for further adventures. Could we be look- ing at a sequel? I should think so, as Gabriel plunges into even more dangerous territory, and one or two loose ends come back to haunt him. (Boyd has hinted that he has two further novels planned.) Gabriel’s Moon isn’t Boyd at full steam: his hero isn’t quite Smiley, and nor is he quite Bond (with whom Boyd has form, as he penned a 007 volume called Solo, intentionally more realistic than the Fleming novels). Even so, he’s a pleasant enough companion, and his many surprises and setbacks make up a smoothly gripping read.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.