Member Reviews
An adventure in perfectly written form. This was a joy to read and it makes me happy that this was my first William Boyd book and I have so many more to read.
This is William Boyd’s best book yet with many storyline tentacles stretching in different, intriguing directions. I gave the book the following SCORE:
Setting: Britain, Cadiz, Warsaw, 1936 and 1961
Characters: Gabriel Dax is the perfect reluctant spy – a self-declared “useful idiot” - who allows himself to be placed in seemingly innocuous projects that quietly turn into something much more. He is surrounded by a cast of strong, intelligent women who, for better or worse, lead him into unexpected territory.
Overview of plot: Dax is a writer of travel books and, with that perfect cover, is used by MI6 operatives to perform easy, harmless communications with foreign agents. He is also haunted by the perception that his small globe moon light caused the fire that burned his house down and killed his mother when he was 6 years old. His analyst, his MI6 handler, his lower-class girlfriend, and other supporting characters lead him down multiple engaging paths and make this book a treasure.
Recommendation: 5 stars and a full recommendation
Extras: A few simple things set this book, and Boyd’s writing in general, above others: chapter titles, which are always welcome and add to the story’s enjoyment and a few words (not condescendingly introduced) sprinkled in that require looking up and possibly add to readers’ vocabulary
Thanx to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for the opportunity to provide this candid review.
Here things had been going so well for me with William Boyd’s otherwise resolutely unsentimental thriller, “Gabriel’s Moon,” when, in a final-page departure, the novel abandoned the uncompromisingly realistic tone that it had been striking earlier and ended on a note of enduring romantic love.
Or that was my takeaway, anyway, from a reunion of two characters which, with their history, I’d thought might well end not in the promising way it does but in the sort of chilling way that concludes another novel of roughly the same period, Newton Thornburg’s “Cutter and Bone.”
Granted, Thornburg’s book was situated in the post-Vietnam period and Boyd’s several years earlier, but the same sort of imperialist impulse, be it with the Congo in Boyd’s novel or Vietnam in Thornburg's, is at the heart of both books, with Boyd’s perhaps the more personally relevant for me, with its being situated in a time when I was a senior in high school and, particularly with a course I was taking in international relations, just coming to awareness of the machinations of the Cold War.
Vividly evocative Boyd’s novel was for me of that early ’60s time, and not just with the situation in the Congo, but also with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which took the bloom off the rose for many of us of the Kennedys’ Camelot, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had us all saying our prayers for the threat of Soviet missiles headed our way.
Also unsparingly realistic is the novel’s registration of possible U.S. complicity in the death of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba as well as its intimation of possible U.S. involvement in Guatemala, both of which are signaled by the novel’s most interesting character for me, MI6 operative Faith Green, whom almost despite himself the main character, Gabriel, finds himself attracted to.
Certainly much more interesting she is for him than the current woman in his life, who while sexually satisfying isn’t nearly as overall alluring as Faith. Indeed, something of a heterosexual literary male’s dreams Faith is, with her erotic charge given added voltage by her overall mysteriousness, including her having been captured and tortured during the war and her being the instigator of the novel’s action by sending Gabriel on mysterious art-buying trips to Spain and Warsaw.
So intriguing a character, indeed, is Faith that to my mind she could easily have been the centerpiece of the novel. But in the end she’s given disappointingly little yardage in an otherwise pretty standard spy novel which for all its intriguing disclosures – apparently not so dire the threat we’d thought, those Soviet missiles – suffers from the usual improbabilities and artifice of the genre.
Also, there’s a secondary plot with the main character’s mother having died in a fire which looked to be connected to the main plot, though I never did fully make the connection. And there’s an occasional excess of prose, such as when Gabriel, in trying to make sense of his situation, thinks of himself as being in a “vermiculated” labyrinth or when, just a few pages later, he finds something “rebarbative” about another character.
Overall, though, for all my nits, a satisfyingly entertaining read, Boyd’s novel, especially whenever Faith is on stage, and a reproach to the sentiment of some today who would have it that the ’50s and early ’60s, with their “Father Knows Best” and “Leave it to Beaver” image, were a better time than our own.
Wow! What an exciting novel! I read the entire thing today. A spy thriller set in the early 1960s is not the type of book I would normally choose, but I am so glad I requested a copy from NetGalley (thank you!). Boyd’s writing is superb; I felt like I was there with Gabriel, a travel writer with a traumatic past who becomes a spy. I loved it!
This was an enjoyable novel overall - I loved all of the different settings all over the world, and the espionage aspects of it were fascinating. I did find Gabriel to be a bit irritatingly obtuse at times, and I thought that he seemed rather unaffected by the loss of life in his adventures.