GABRIEL'S MOON

A London-based writer finds himself stuck in the webs of British intelligence.

It’s 1960 and Gabriel Dax is flying home to England after interviewing Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba when a series of “strange coincidences” begins. He’s upgraded to first class and a woman on the plane is reading one of his travel books. Back home he finds someone has left his flat in “careful disarray,” and the plane woman appears in his neighborhood. She soon reappears, says she’s from MI6, and asks him to “do us a small service.” The job goes smoothly except for the woman who plants heroin on Gabriel, which he discovers before the police do, and the CIA man who’s interested in the tape recording of the Lumumba interview because it reveals a direct link between the prime minister’s subsequent assassination and former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Boyd sets his story not long after news of Guy Burgess and the other Cambridge Five double agents began to emerge. Dealing with such moles becomes a larger theme of the book and provides a nasty twist at the end. In this murky world, Gabriel is a kind of Evelyn Waugh naif caught in a Graham Greene plot, and one of the book’s pleasures is his entirely plausible resourcefulness as challenges grow more perilous. While Boyd craftily ramps up the complications for his reluctant spy, he also gives him a full life apart from intelligence errands. He has embarked on a new travel book, about major rivers. He’s enjoying great sex with a woman who doesn’t seem to demand much more. And he has begun therapy sessions for insomnia and dreams that recall when he was 6 and his house burned down, leaving his mother dead while he barely escaped. Boyd doesn’t quite weave all these strands into a neat little package, but it’s still a highly entertaining book that can easily bear a few loose ends.

An exceptional storyteller in fine form.