(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Something superlatively wonderful happens when truly beautiful writing comes together with an arrestingly clever narrative.
In an ideal world, this would happen in every single book you read, but it’s not always the case and so, when masterfully executed writing and a beguiling storyline rich in ideas and incisively rendered humanity sit in perfect tension, it’s a very special thing.
Such is the case with William Boyd’s latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon, which rather cleverly take a fairly well-used storytelling landscape, that of the spy novel with its hidden connections between seemingly disparate elements and characters who are not what they seem, and does some very emotionally illuminating things with them.
In this 1960s-set novel, Gabriel Dax is an accomplished writer and journalist who has survived a traumatic childhood in which his family home was razed to the ground, a long-scarring incident which left his mother dead and Dax and his brother, Sefton, thankfully far away at boarding school, orphans.
While the protagonist is now in his thirties, the pain and trauma of that terrible night sit with him still, and he is unable to move on with his life as he would like to.
Fortunately Gabriel is self-aware enough – this is critical; it will be his innate self awareness that will save him more than once in Gabriel’s Moon – to know he needs help, and he ends up with a psychiatrist of the Adlerian school (so no lying on couches going on here), Dr Katerina Haas who helps him uncover what went on that night and thus find some measure of peace.
He paused at the newsagent’s at the station’s entrance and bought an Evening Standard. His eye had been caught by a small headline. He held the paper up to the fading afternoon light.
‘PATRICE LUMUMBA – DEATH ANNOUNCED.’
He felt slightly sick. What the hell was going on?
Gabriel’s illuminating and simultaneously troubling but liberating deep dives into his broken psyche are interspersed among a thrillingly clever story which takes from a newly-independent Congo, where Gabriel suddenly finds himself interviewing the country’s first post-colonial prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, to Spain to buy art, which is not being purchased for any aesthetic reasons, and onto Soviet Eastern Europe where the great powers are in the midst of all manner of Cold War brinkmanship.
The reason for all this geographical hopping is not always due to the book Gabriel is writing on rivers and how they have influences the societies that develop around them; rather he finds himself on “errands” for MI6, the British spy agency whose operative, Faith Green, has a way of making Gabriel do things he knows are not necessarily in his best interest.
In fact, while he is seduced by Faith and her ability to confidently do and say anything without a hint of ill-confidence, he knows that the deeper and deeper he gets into being a reluctant spy, the more and more his life will change, and rarely, he suspects, for the better.
As it turns out, though as Gabriel’s Moon builds and builds its story, it’s not so much the spying game that causes him brief, though it does not leave him untouched in some fairly personal ways, but rather his investigations into what happen on the night his life as changed forever as a trusting six-year-old who had yet to learn how dark the world can be.
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia (c) Trevor Leighton)
Of course, as Gabriel finds himself at the mercy of spying operative and competing agencies, none of whom care terribly about the people involved as they do successfully completing their missions and prosecuting their cause, he does have cause to pause whether it is his unwilling side hustle as a spy, which pays handsomely thank you, or his therapeutic sleuthing that poses the greatest threat to his mortality.
Honestly, at one stage, it’s an even toss-up, but the great thrill of Gabriel’s Moon, which shows Boyd at his creatively accomplished best, his words singing and his prose knitting together a narrative with masterfully enthralling ease, is how the story holds these two immersively vivaciously and emotionally impactful strands in perfect tension.
Gabriel’s Moon also reads as if Boyd is having a tremendous amount of fun into the bargain.
As the story progresses, seemingly unconnected events are shown to be closely and consequentially connected, people who thought had no relationship to each other are found to be allies or enemies or both, and a plethora of red herrings and clues all add up in ways you simply don’t see coming.
It’s a joy to have all the narrative dots connect and it makes the story, which is already a beguiling pleasure to read, an exciting romp not just across countries but psyches and political imperative too.
Gabriel headed for the door and lingered there a moment to scan the room — to lock it away in his memory. He saw Caldwell approach the man in the brown suit. They both turned to look back at Gabriel. He raised his hand in a brief salute — yes, it’s me, I’m the one — and then left.
But thrilling thought it all is, and it’s thrilling in a quietly nuanced but boldly fun way which does involve drama but not overwhelmingly so – all the best spies eschew drama in favour of deadly cold calculation and execution, in the shadows if at all possible, what really draws you into Gabriel’s Moon is the journey he is on as a person.
It is, in fact, his humanity, broken but hoping to be knit back together, that is centre stage in the novel when he is out on his missions, which rarely go quite to plan, or when he is home trying for something approaching normal life.
Boyd amps up the impact of the storyline, not by driving events to a narrative frenzy, but rather by focusing on the people involved and why they do what they do, most particularly of course, Gabriel, who is our eyes and ears on this world in the shadows and what it is like to be drawn into it with little to no warning and no real preparation.
Gabriel’s Moon is a seductively fun and clever piece of writing that reads a like a dream, tells a story that mostly but not always lives in the more dark and nightmarish parts of life, and which draws you in, yes, with its espionage tales and geopolitical intrigue, but more compellingly because its eponymous protagonist is trying to figure out who he is and what his life should be, fairly ordinary existential maneuvering that takes place in quite extraordinary circumstances, his humanity on display always, no matter the events, in ways that prove profoundly affecting and all but unforgettable.