Gabriel's Moon
“Throughout Boyd’s novel, characters present with one face but turn out to be concealing significant, even entire, aspects of themselves.”
Early in William Boyd’s 18th novel, Gabriel’s Moon, travel writer Gabriel Dax is flying home to London after a round of trekking when, returning to his seat, he notices a woman reading one of his books. He’s tempted to ask what she thinks of it but decides to pass on. The moment fades—inconsequential, a coincidence. Or maybe not.
Time and again in Boyd’s deft and twisty tale, it turns out that ostensibly chance encounters may actually have been orchestrated and that Gabriel’s seeming volition has been halved by manipulation. Uncertainty abounds in Gabriel’s Moon, where the titular semi-hero becomes an accidental spy for the British intelligence service MI6. What’s not uncertain is Boyd’s gift for tale-telling: his latest book is a satisfyingly layered page-turner that, ultimately, foregrounds the ways we choose the stories we live by.
The novel opens with a brief prologue depicting the fire that killed Gabriel’s already widowed young mother. Left to be raised by an uncle, six-year-old Gabriel is bequeathed a lifetime of bad dreams and the knowledge that his own nightlight—his precious glass “moon”—likely caused the inferno. Nearly 25 years later in 1960, Gabriel is living in London, where his travel memoirs and occasional journalism pieces have earned him some renown. A chance assignment finds him conducting an interview with Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose musings are enmeshed in a Cold War web that includes nuclear secrets, Soviet spies, and President Eisenhower.
When Gabriel returns to London, an operative of MI6 named Faith Green enlists him for a superficially simple job requiring a trip to Spain. Gabriel supposes his itinerant lifestyle plays a part in Faith’s outreach but begins to suspect there may be a connection to his interview with Lumumba: the audiotapes of their conversation are perhaps more consequential than he first understood. Gabriel accedes to what he believes is Faith’s one-off assignment only to find himself quickly sucked into a vortex of intrigue and misdirection that, against the picturesque backdrops of London, Cadiz, and Madrid, becomes deeply perilous.
An urgent mistrust plagues Gabriel as Faith’s requests multiply; he loses the ability to discern what is happenstance and what is driven by design: “He . . . was . . . beginning to be infected by the covert operative’s routing paranoia and standard second-guessing proclivities.” No one—not even Gabriel’s therapist, whom he has turned to by way of making sense of the long-ago fire—seems worthy of trust; all is tenuous, falsifiable.
Even Gabriel fakes his credentials on a business card, part of a general accumulation of deceit that dismays him. “He saw how a life of duplicity could so swiftly corrupt you. Nothing was straightforward, there were always other motives, people couldn’t be trusted, nobody was what they seemed.” When his entanglement in affairs far beyond his understanding arouses an unforeseen romantic obsession, Gabriel recognizes just how difficult it has become for him to make sense of his fragmenting sense of self.
Boyd’s surehandedness (some of his subplots could be a lesser writer’s entire book) grants the novel’s disparate dangers meaningful and plausible connection; even a minor rodent problem in Gabriel’s apartment feels as though it might fit with the general scheming. Another neat trick of Boyd’s is that he makes the fanciful seem as though it’s within range—as Gabriel’s Moon trots onward and Gabriel improvises his way through thickets of jeopardy, the notion that just about anyone could slowly, unwittingly, without wanting or intending to, turn into a spy, or at least turn into someone who would do things they never imagined, gains heft.
As duplicity takes over Gabriel’s life, the gap between the existence he’s always assumed and his newly acquired occupation collapses. It’s dizzying, though Boyd maintains a control that rarely turns breezy or untenable. Events are cleanly paced, the dialogue is vibrant, exchanges advance the plot and often startle. There’s the charm of a lost, distant world, as well—no cell phones, of course, and communication in general is cumbersome; Gabriel passes a gun through airport security in a hidden compartment; documents are copied by mimeograph; in the news are reports of Franco, the Berlin Wall, Khruschev, forewarnings of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
What Gabriel finds most confounding is how unknowable identity is—others’ and one’s own. Throughout Boyd’s novel, characters present with one face but turn out to be concealing significant, even entire, aspects of themselves. “You never suspect a successful spy, let alone a successful double agent,” Gabriel is informed midway through the story before confronting himself similarly: “[Gabriel] realized he had crossed some sort of defining line as a person, as an individual . . . He had reached a point in his life from which there was no turning back, even if he should wish to.” It’s obfuscation all the way down. Gabriel may be chasing unknown ends, but Boyd certainly brings a brilliant gravity to the pursuit.