If you love a knotty spy thriller, check out the latest gem from Top Ten contributor William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon. Set in London, Spain, Africa and behind the Iron Curtain during the early 1960s, it’s intricate plot will grip you and keep you guessing.
Nobody seems to plays it straight, except, perhaps, for our hero, a successful travel writer named Gabriel Dax, who is haunted by fragmentary and probably false memories of the fire that left him an orphan when he was six.
What do we really know? Who can we really trust? Good questions!
As the story opens, Dax’s life is about to take a dangerous turn when a visit to the Congo – newly liberated from Belgian rule – offers an opportunity to interview the country’s new president, Patrice Lumumba. Unfortunately, Lumumba is a little too forthcoming, not only saying American and other western interests want him dead, but also naming three officials (all of whom, it turns out, are using pseudonyms) behind the plot. As Dax is returning home to London, Lumumba is murdered and recording of their conservation become coveted by murderous forces.
This is a spy novel, so that, of course, is only one of the plots. Back home, Dax is roped into espionage work as a highly-paid courier by a British woman, Faith Green, whom he soon lusts after. She is way too smart for him, turning Dax into a puppet she sends hither and yon in pursuit of a British agent who may be selling secrets to the Soviets. The intricate plot naturally includes murder, booze, sex and, for good measure, a little psychoanalysis. It also involves deeper themes, especially how memory – which can be configured and reconfigured – configures us, and the ways we become trapped by our choices. Boyd also does a superb job of portraying the young writer/journalist’s mind – Dax instinctively sees every incident and encounter as fodder for his next article or book; if you can’t write about it, it never happened.
In his Washington Post review of the novel, Malcolm Forbes observed: “Like Boyd’s 2006 spy novel, “Restless,” “Gabriel’s Moon” is a hugely enjoyable and satisfyingly intricate historical thriller. As ever, Boyd’s evocations of time and place are deftly rendered, whether Franco-era Spain or communist Warsaw. He convinces with his depiction of the Cold War heating up, and of the spying game and the attendant panic and paranoia felt by its players. … Boyd routinely impresses with his portrait of an individual who is in too deep emotionally and in the dark as to what is going on around him. ‘He was like a man in an ever-widening, ever-vermiculated labyrinth,’ Boyd writes, ‘but one with no exit.’” Gabriel’s resourceful attempts to get out and get ahead make for gripping reading.
As Erica Wagner wrote in the Financial Times, “A new William Boyd novel is always a pleasure, and this is a read that will keep you completely hooked to the very last page.
- Read an excerpt from Gabriel’s Moon
- Listen to Boyd discuss writing Gabriel’s Moon
- Learn more about his work at this website
William Boyd’s Top Ten List
1. My Life and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (1860-1906)
2. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
3. A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark (1988)
4. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1864–65)
5. Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79)
6. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
7. Couples by John Updike (1968)
8. The Life of Henri Brulard by Stendhal (1890)
9. The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge (1974)
10. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948)
Appreciation of Stendhal’s The Life of Henri Brulard by William Boyd
“Stendhal” is a pseudonym. The author’s real name was Marie-Henri Beyle. Stendhal is best known for the great and classic 19th century French novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He was born in Grenoble in 1793 and died in Paris in 1842.
I have chosen his strange autobiography instead of one of his novels because I think it is an extraordinary 19th century text, one that was only published in 1890, long after Stendhal’s death. It’s not clear why Stendhal chose the title, however. Very quickly he reveals that he himself is “Henri Brulard”—another false identity—and in a way this fact illustrates the astonishing modernity of this memoir. It is both playful, in a literary sense, and very frank.
Stendhal hated his father (and doesn’t spare him) and he hated his native city, Grenoble—“The capital of boredom.” Moreover, the book’s narrative is the opposite of chronological. Ostensibly an account of the author’s early years, it in fact skips forward and back through Stendhal’s life as he pleases, almost as if it were a record of his meandering thoughts. It is also illustrated with copious little hand drawn sketches, done by Stendhal himself—plans of houses or city streets, schematic landscapes and so forth, that flesh out the story of his life.
The whole concept of the book is wonderfully out-of-left-field. Stendhal’s honesty is very compelling and his spirit seems very contemporary—all his grumbles and irritations, his love affairs—requited and unrequited—his professional ups and downs are candidly and mercilessly recounted. You could imagine Stendhal living today—the tone of voice is so surprisingly contemporary—as there is nothing remotely dated about this autobiography thinly disguised as a biography. Even if you knew nothing about Stendhal or his famous novels you would be held and beguiled, I believe. A unique piece of 19th century life-writing, as we would now describe it.