In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how eight-year-old Gabriel Dax experienced the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. The firefighters’ verdict that the cause was Gabriel’s moon-shaped and candle-powered nightlight. About 25 years later, that fiery night haunts his dreams, destroying his sleep and his peace of mind.

Gabriel has become a book author and writer of travel articles for a leading newspaper, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames. His brother Sefton, who works in some nondescript Foreign Office job, keeps an eye on him, asking him to do little courier-like favours from time to time—the substance and importance of which Gabriel does not know, nor does he want to.

As the main story opens, Gabriel is in Léopoldville (now Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, he connects with an old friend from school connected with the new government who arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the new country’s prime minister, Patrice Lamumba. Lamumba was newsworthy for many reasons and a controversial figure in the West, which viewed him as pro-Soviet. That was poor politics for a leader sitting on a ‘gold mine’ of uranium. Gabriel gets his interview and, flying back to London, spots another passenger reading one of his books. It’s a too-brief moment of validation since, after working hard on the lengthy Lamumba article, his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Having a consoling pasta dinner, the woman from the airplane—the one with impeccable reading taste—sits down with him and introduces herself as Faith Green. He describes his article’s fate, and she says Lamumba is dead. A shocked Gabriel tries to fact-check this with both his editor and brother, both of whom say it is not true, and if it were, they would know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel find himself easing into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies delivered most convincingly of all.

Over that same dinner, Faith tries to persuade him to take on a well-paying courier job for her, but he’s had enough of political dabbling and refuses. What’s more, he comes to believe that someone very badly wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed operatives of the US, British, and Belgian governments were out to get him. He named names.

Meanwhile, Gabriel’s chronic lack of sleep is out of control, and he engages with a psychotherapist who encourages him to try to find out more facts about the fire. She believes his difficulty stems from too many unanswered questions. This subplot nicely echoes the main story, in which Gabriel is constantly trying to figure out bedrock issues in a frenzy of misdirection.

Ironically, although Gabriel is, essentially, a freelance operative when he runs an errand for Faith, he’s actually pretty good at it. Not having much of clue what’s really going on, though plenty of reasonable theories, doesn’t hinder him a bit. It’s an exciting read as he zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to the next, and develops the self-preservation skills it seems increasingly likely that he needs. It’s risky business, but it seems he just can’t say no to Faith. You may feel this is like allying with a cobra, but the next moment it makes perfect sense and you cross your fingers that the cobra has been defanged.

The story is packed full of interesting, richly developed characters—Gabriel and Faith, of course; a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; and an irritating Liverpool journalist who may just be onto him. I liked them all, especially the dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier disagreed with the conclusions of the fire investigation. A word about the names: ‘Gabriel’ is indeed a messenger, though not from God, and Faith, well, that he needs.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as Gabriel himself might do. It’s no surprise that Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He has twice been a finalist for the Booker Prize and has won numerous other awards. His novel Any Human Heart was adapted into a television series.More spies! Moscow X by David McCloskey and The Translator by Harriett Crawley.

Viking
Kindle, Print
£9.99
CFL Rating: 5 stars