Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd review - 'a jangling experience'

William Boyd

I am never quite sure exactly what I make of William Boyd. The work of his for which I can happily express great admiration is the curious Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, a toothsome hoax on a par with Ern Malley. There is a similar energy to Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart or John James Todd in The New Confessions, both books which I enjoyed even if they seemed in the shadow of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. His debut, A Good Man in Africa, now seems rather dated, but I have a great deal of affection for Brazzaville Beach. The attempt to imitate Ian Fleming with Solo showed that Boyd is far better when he is imitating his own fictions.

Reading Gabriel’s Moon is a jangling experience. I finished it with an abrupt jolt of “was that it?” tinged with “have I missed something?” It is, and I shudder to write this, alright I suppose, but not exactly not bad. Even its plaudits seem half-hearted – he is “unflaggingly readable”, and “giving in to” his work is recommended. I couldn’t quite fathom what is meant by calling Boyd “the best realistic storyteller of his generation”: there are, admittedly, no aliens, but there are coincidences and conveniences (in this instance, to take one example, the brother of the protagonist Gabriel’s girlfriend just happens to be a locksmith when he just happens to need a lock picked).

It is a novel that cannot settle, in terms of location or genre. Gabriel Dax is a moderately successful travel writer, on a trip to the newly independent Congo when he is offered, through a varsity chum, now Minister of Health, an audience with the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. He pays more attention to the woman on the plane home reading one of his books than to Lumumba’s paranoid warning about assassination attempts. The same woman, Faith, tells him of Lumumba’s death before it becomes public knowledge, while recruiting Gabriel to buy a painting in Spain for ulterior espionage reasons. Gabriel has occasionally provided a similar, plausibly deniable service for his brother Sefton, and has worked with their uncle, a gallerist, so these fortuitous connections can be naturalistic within the kind of networks on which thrillers depend. More curious are Gabriel’s sleep problems, stemming from having been in a house fire as a child, which claimed the life of his mother. His new therapist – who knew Freud, naturellement – thinks anamnesis, recovering “a memory you don’t know you have”, might ameliorate his insomnia and night terrors.

If there is one thematic bridge, it is perhaps in a speech from the enigmatic Faith: “Well, we’re basically what we call ‘Termite Extraction’…We look for traitors, double agents, disloyal employees in our wider organisation – MI6 and MI5. We don’t like the word ‘Mole’ here. Moles might spoil your lawn but termites can bring down a house”. The genre plot takes in Cuba, Franco, the nuclear balance of power, Warsaw, Rome, the Cambridge Four and Eisenhower. Meanwhile the psychological house is being fumigated for whatever grief or guilt makes Gabriel a dilettante afraid of commitment. But the connection is a stretch.

It is all rather superficial. Apart from meals, there is an inordinate amount of attention paid to dress, usually women’s: “an over-blouse – a taupe colour, some thick material – and a knife-pleated chequered skirt”, “the scarf at her throat was flame orange today, he noticed. She had an agate brooch on her lab coat”, “she was in an indigo dress today, he noticed, that had a sort of oily shimmer to it”. These details do not really serve characterisation, and read more like notes to a casting department. The detail is not even particularly scene-setting. At 264 pages, this is conspicuously shorter than most of Boyd’s novels, where such writing could be excused as ambience.

Another stylistic quirk is self-interrogation. A quick survey yields “What games were being played here?”, “What in God’s name have I got myself into?”, “What the hell was going on?” Rather being the comforting indicators for the reader of being manipulated by a master plotter, it comes across as being stuck with someone constantly bemused and puzzled by proceedings. Boyd has often featured artists, the film world, writers, photographers and suchlike, and here it is no different. One character uses “Raymond Queneau” as a pseudonym, though there is little connection with OuLiPo, and Gabriel rattles off “TE Lawrence, Charles Doughty, HV Morton, William Sansom, Lawrence Durrell, James Morton, Laurie Lee” – there’s even a fictitious list of Dax’s works, including the book he supposedly working on, “Rivers (in preparation)”. It is almost telling. This feels like notes towards a novel, drafts and sketches, maybe even a pilot (it ends with a “next time on...” cliché).

Dark things happen in the course of the novel, but its flatness strips them of any emotional impact. Gabriel has an infestation of mice and I cared rather more for their fates than the human deaths. Gabriel’s Moon is similar to those limpid watercolours painted by inter-war Oxbridge undergraduates: pleasant enough, technically passable and of no great consequence.

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd, Penguin Viking, £20