Cold Sunset by William Boyd review: 'a skilful storyteller'

William Boyd

Becoming a spy was easy enough for Gabriel Dax. All he had to do was to buy a picture and deliver it. The fact that the picture contained microdots, that the person who asked him to buy it was the alluring Faith Green and the person she told him to deliver it to was Kit Caldwell, MI6’s man in Madrid, was the core plot of William Boyd’s novel Gabriel’s Moon, the first book in a trilogy.

That, though, was in 1960, when Dax hadn’t yet killed anybody or fully entered the paranoid world of espionage. Now, two books later, it’s 1964. Caldwell is a triple agent in Moscow desperately wanting to be exfiltrated back to Britain, and Green - Dax’s MI6 handler in every sense of the word - asks him to help.

One thing hasn’t changed. Now, as then, Dax is making a name for himself as a travel writer, and that’s how Boyd re-introduces him, looking out at the Pacific from his Santa Monica hotel and working out the precise shade of grey (“slate-grey, mouse-grey, dirty dishwasher-grey. Zinc, ash, pewter ....”) with which to describe the ocean. He feels the “palpitant” breeze on his face and the reader feels that such a lush, descriptive style probably did indeed pass for good travel writing in 1964.

Apart from his obsession with Faith Green, to Dax the spying game is just a lucrative side-hustle to his career as a writer: he is little more than a trusted courier, the smallest cog in the espionage machine. That’s what he’s doing in Santa Monica: meeting a dying man who wants to get something off his chest about a possible traitor at Bletchley Park. It being 1964, Dax knows nothing about that, because for the next ten years nobody does.

Already, though, you can see what Boyd sees in Dax. Because he is little more than an MI6 bagman, he makes an ideal reader surrogate. Because he is a travel writer working on a book called On The Beaten Track (“about how to make unfamiliar places in the world seem new again”) he has an effective cover, one month interviewing the rat-catchers in Rome’s Colosseum, the next chatting to the litter-pickers of - oh, look - Red Square.

A skilful storyteller, Boyd metes out the net of plot only very slowly and only once he knows he has fixed the reader’s attention on Dax. If anything, he makes him too fascinating: the mother burnt in the house fire for which he blames himself though he was only six; the insomnia only cured through three years of psychotherapy; the scenes with his psychiatrist transcribed as in a play; the backstory backwash from the last book that threatens his carefully described domestic bliss in East Sussex.

And, of course, Faith Green. Dax has James Bond levels of sex, but his fascination with Green goes beyond that. She is much older, and her body marked by cigarette burns she suffered under interrogation by the Gestapo (“leopard spots”, he calls them). She remains a mystery.

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For the most part, it works. Boyd knows how to handle a plot, and by using an accidental spy rather than a cold-blooded careerist intelligence officer, breaks free of le Carré’s long shadow even when tackling similar themes. Although the most obvious comparison in his other novels is with his psychologically burdened Bond in Solo or Ruth in his Costa Award-winning Reckless (2006), I can’t help thinking instead of Adam Kindred - a civilian forced to live on his wits outside society - in Ordinary Thunderstorms.

Or at least, that’s the Gabriel Dax we first met: an innocent-ish Everyman. But in the course of this novel he realises that he is steeped in blood and no longer a part-time spy. We pick up on this too. Because by the time the plot finally swings round to Moscow and the whole business of exfiltrating Kit Caldwell, the reader should be petrified at such an innocent as Dax being in the belly of the beast, right at the heart of darkness. And the reader - this reader, anyway - isn’t.

Cold Sunset, by William Boyd, Viking, £20

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