Tag Archives: Gabriel’s Moon

William Boyd, The Predicament

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William Boyd, The Predicament. Penguiin Viking hb 2025. 259 pp. Personal copy

A sequel to last year’s Gabriel’s Moon, about which I posted a brief note HERE, this is the second in a projected trilogy of novels about ‘accidental spy’ Gabriel Dax. In the previous novel Gabriel is sucked into the murky world of MI6 espionage by his dodgy brother.

This time round Gabriel still harbours a passion for his spy boss, Faith, but it’s very much an on-off relationship, and he’s more stuck on her than she seems to be on him. There are several situations in this novel, again rather too heavy on plot twists and mysterious, duplicitous characters, when they seem to be getting closer, but then she drifts away again, aloof and inscrutable. Gabriel moons (sorry about the pun) like a teenager.

The central spy plot is again very complicated. Gabriel is playing a dangerous game with the Russians, who pay him handsomely for information, unaware (or are they?) that he’s a double agent. He goes to various exotic destinations again, gets caught up in murders and political plots, initially involving CIA machinations in Guatemala, and then a planned assassination attempt on JFK in Berlin.

As an amateur, reluctant spy who constantly wishes he could just focus on his primary career as a travel writer, Gabriel is remarkably resourceful and astute when he finds himself in sticky situations as a result of his espionage. Despite his obsession with Faith, he has some flirtatious moments with a number of other women with whom he comes into contact in his guise as an MI6 ‘unit’ (less established and prestigious than an agent).

It’s a competent piece of genre spy fiction in the manner of le Carré with hints of Ian Fleming (Boyd is the author of a James Bond ‘continuation’ novel), Graham Greene and even Frederick Forsyth, but there are some of that genre’s clichés and stereotypes, and several over-stated ‘how do I get out of this mess’ situations. There are too many scenes in which Gabriel questions his involvement in the spy game, or asks rhetorically what is happening in his missions – his apparent bemusement becomes tiresome.

There’s an excessive amount of background detail, too, over and above what’s strictly necessary to establish the multiple international and domestic settings, or the early 60s setting (lots of smoking and heavy drinking, and unreconstructed masculinity). We get detailed descriptions of what the characters are wearing in almost every situation they appear in.

It’s an entertaining enough read, but probably best suited to those who have more of a taste for spy thrillers than I do.

Rachel Cusk and others

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A quick scan of some recent reading, starting with…

Rachel Cusk, Outline (Vintage, 2016; 20141)

I think this is my first experience of Rachel Cusk’s renowned autofiction. Outline is a satisfying read – unusual, surprising, quietly innovative. There’s little conventional plot – the novel, as the ambiguous title suggests, consists of loosely linked chapters in each of which a character tells our narrator (Faye) something about their life.

Several of these chapters deal with her exchanges with the man sitting next to her on a flight to Athens, where she’s to teach a creative writing course. Over the next few weeks she meets him several times, and we see a rather awkward development in their relationship.

Other chapters are devoted to sessions in her classes and the writing exercises her students engage in, or social exchanges with friends and acquaintances. These conversations often digress into lengthy philosophical musings. Doesn’t sound very gripping, but somehow it works, the mix of banal, everyday stuff mixed in with existential abstractions. Some of Beckett’s fiction comes to mind, and he’s namechecked at one point – not a bad influence, if that’s what he is

Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary Translated from the German by Damion Searls. NYRB Classics, 2013.

I’ve posted before on the strange fiction of Swiss ‘outsider’ author Robert Walser (1878-1956) – there’s a brief profile of him in my piece on his novel Jacob von Gunten (link HERE). My post on WG Sebald’s A Place in the Country (link HERE) provides a bit more context on this enigmatic writer, brilliantly evoked there as ‘the clairvoyant of the small’.

The first part of this collection consists of the essays of a fictional Swiss schoolboy, Fritz Kocher – curious vignettes headed ‘Man’, ‘Autumn’, ‘Friendship’, and so on. They sound loftily philosophical, but are (possibly ironically) simplistic and banal.

In parts 2 and 3 there are stories and essays which meander eccentrically: there’s often no apparent destination for the narrative, they’re like psychogeographical dérives (I posted on this concept of Guy Debord’s HERE) in prose. They’re sketches, ruminations, celebrations of the everyday. Despite the surface banality that hovers perilously close to tedium, Walser’s prose constantly subverts expectation, surprising the reader with bizarre insights, like the reflection in some of his essays on life in the military (in WWI, it seems, though war isn’t overtly mentioned); being a soldier is ‘nice’, he concludes.

Marcel Dirsus, How Tyrants Fall – and how nations survive John Murray, 2024

The title says it all, really. Each chapter surveys an aspect of tyranny: how autocrats and dictators (from Africa, S. America and elsewhere) gain power, keep it, and usually lose it. What threatens them? How can a tyrant be toppled?

This is a salutary and sometimes depressing piece of journalistic analysis at a time when our world seems to lurching ever more towards tyrannical governance. I’m writing this the day after the AfD in Germany came second in the German elections. Trump and his sycophantic minions endorsed this neo-Nazi party, and seem to admire autocrats like Putin. If we want to emerge intact from this rising tide of tyranny we need to pay attention to the lessons in books like this.

Percival Everett, James Mantle, 2024

This deserves much of the acclaim it has received. It’s a retelling of the story of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the fugitive slave Jim who accompanies him. Like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which I wrote about recently, it starkly highlights the horrors of slavery and white supremacist attitudes.

William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon Penguin Viking, 2024

As in Blue Afternoon, Boyd’s previous novel (I posted on it HERE), there’s too much plot in Gabriel’s Moon, his latest. After a strong start – the young Gabriel narrowly escapes death in a house fire apparently started by the boy’s titular candle nightlight – it becomes a rather standard spy thriller. Now an adult and a successful travel writer, Gabriel finds himself embroiled in the skulduggery and subterfuge of the world of espionage. It’s another entertaining Boyd novel, set in a sixties world of heavy drinking and smoking, but there are too many conventionally shady characters, contrived plot twists and stereotypically exotic (and tawdry) settings for all that skulduggery (what a fine word – that’s why I’ve used it twice).