One of William Boyd’s appeals – and weaknesses – is that he does love a good melodrama. You’ll find stagefuls of them in his bouncy new novel. It’s the 1960s. The Cold War simmers. The US and the USSR are deep into dark dealings. Elsewhere, swinging London is penduluming in all directions. The Congo has also swung – into independence – so our protagonist, travel writer Gabriel Dax, is sent to interview its new leader, Patrice Lumumba.
Job soon done – except it isn’t. On the plane home, Gabriel sees a comely woman reading one of his books. His bleak Chelsea flat has been entered. The phone rings, but nobody speaks. That woman from the plane appears and disappears in his street. Threatening organ notes begin to throb.
Mind you, they always have for Gabriel. When he was a child, his night light (the book’s title) may have started the fire that graphically killed his lavender-scented mother. No wonder he’s plagued by insomnia and night terrors and is seeing a psychiatrist.
Then there’s his brother Sefton, a Significant Something in the Foreign Office who has been getting him to drop off sealed letters in exotic places. Soon, that plane woman is doing the same, in between licking Dubonnet off her fingers, which sends Gabriel’s libido into orbit. He shoots off to Poland and to Spain, where he’s to contact an artist. Yeah, right. Our amateur agent is quickly sucked into the grey, devious world of professionals.
A bit like le Carré? A big bit. There’s the slow, building burn and final conflagration; the Cold War setting and European locales; the moral ambivalence and furtive government involvement; the solitary, jaded protagonist-with-a-past; the big cast of eccentric secondary figures (you’ll appreciate Uncle Aldous with his bow ties and nacreous silk suits). But it’s similarity rather than imitation.
Cigarettes are lit at every pause. An American woman dies in Warsaw. Gabriel is driven up a rutted path to improbably find an air base with B-47 bombers capable of carrying those new-fangled H-bombs. A duplicitous swine gets shot in the groin.
While all this goes on, our man is also trying to ease away from a Wimpy Bar waitress, as well as dealing with the bloody mice infesting his flat. Will you like the ending’s violins, after a spell of “unbearable craving … a stabbing ache”? It’s certainly a contrast.
Boyd revels in language, and he chucks it all over the place here. Adjectives and adverbs abound: Gabriel is “mysteriously upgraded … vaguely troubled”. He “smiles engagingly”, even “urinates copiously”. There’s a lot of showy vocab: refulgent, flocculent, rebarbative, vermiculated. And there are more than a few wince-inducing sentences: “Gabriel felt the loin-tug of sexual energy renewed”. As one does.
But the plot twists, leaps, ducks around and ahead with eager energy. The doggedly decent win through. There’s a suggestion we may be hearing more of Gabriel. It won’t be a problem.
Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd (Viking, $38), is out now.
