When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind.
In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’. As in his earlier work, there’s still plenty of globe-trotting and journeying through the past, but his place within British writing has landed up closer to John le Carré and the higher end of Frederick Forsyth. In 2013, Boyd was commissioned to write a James Bond novel, Solo, but – in contrast to Sebastian Faulks’s Bond book Devil May Care – the result didn’t feel like a holiday from the author’s usual output so much as a more distilled version of it.
Two years ago, Boyd even lamented that ‘Flaubert’s pernickety paragraph-a-week model… has become the template for serious writing at the furthest reaches of the literary novel’. He appeared to claim as his own model the less fashionable Stendhal, ‘a sort of hack… who wrote his great novel The Red and the Black in 60 days’. He defiantly went on:
When people dismiss storytelling, I say: ‘Well, you have a go at it.’ You can polish your prose until it gleams, but a story that has readers wanting to know what happens next … that’s something you discard at your peril.
Sure enough, Gabriel’s Moon shows no interest in aiming for the Flaubertian. On the whole, all breakfasts are ‘washed down’ with coffee and all dinners ‘washed down’ with wine. As well as those only-for-writers facial descriptions I began with, we get an ‘untimely demise’, a ‘bald pate’ and a ‘greying at the temples’. And yet, of course, we also get a cracking read.
The main character – and the latest of Boyd’s innocents abroad – is Gabriel Dax, a travel writer who, in 1961, is in Léopoldville just after the Belgian Congo has ceased to be Belgian. Offered an interview with the post-colonial leader Patrice Lumumba, Gabriel records the man explaining how the West is out to murder him. The trouble is that Lumumba names names – some belonging to members of MI6 and the CIA – which means that when he’s killed not long afterwards, the two organisations are unscrupulously determined to acquire Gabriel’s tapes.
But that’s just for starters. On the plane back from Congo to London, Gabriel is upgraded to first class, where he spots a glamorous woman (with a ‘strong-boned’ face) reading one of his books. Needless to say, neither of these things is coincidental – as he discovers when the woman, whose name is Faith Green, contacts him to carry out a lucrative but mysterious task for British Intelligence: travel to Cadiz, buy a drawing from an artist there and deliver it to MI6’s head of station in Madrid, a duly louche homosexual called Kit.
Meanwhile, well… an awful lot of stuff happens that it would be a shame to spoil – although I think I can say that Gabriel becomes ever more Bondian in his competence, fondness for booze and tendency to fall for women with exotic names.
In The James Bond Dossier – his stout, academic-baiting 1965 defence of Ian Fleming – Kingsley Amis excuses Fleming’s wilder storylines on the grounds that ‘instantly recognisable implausibilities are better than the sort that sneak up on you’. (Incidentally, he earlier makes the point that Bond’s daily intake of half a bottle of spirits is ‘another instance of Fleming’s policy of moderation about Bond’s attributes’ and so ‘promotes self-identification’ – which may be more autobiographical than Amis intended.) Gabriel’s Moon, for its part, has its fair share of both types. MI6’s willingness to let Gabriel have a (Chekhov’s) gun, for instance, will surely strike most readers as a transparent improbability required for the plot. Elsewhere, it mightn’t be until after finishing the book that you find yourself thinking, ‘Hold on a minute….’
But in the end such objections seem beside the point in a novel so deliberately and satisfyingly stuffed with incident, Cold War history, romance and any number of mysteries, not all of them overlapping. At one stage, Faith gently mocks Gabriel (a Stendhal fan) for the fact that his travel books are ‘a bit over the top’. He defends himself by saying that ‘you have to give the full vicarious pleasure’ to the reader, and approvingly quotes Lawrence Durrell’s declaration that ‘you had to give’ travel writing the ‘full plum-pudding’. Gabriel’s Moon makes it pretty clear that, for Boyd, the same approach should also apply to the spy thriller.
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