Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 3, 2024

Gabriel’s Moon is the sort of book that Hitchcock would have filmed. It has a plot he favored — an innocent man is caught up in a cloak-and-dagger world, manipulated by people he thought he could trust until they try to kill him, forcing him to use his wits to survive.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It builds on evidence that President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate the Congo’s new Prime Minister because of his paranoid belief that Patrice Lumumba was too cozy with communists. The CIA has never been a friend of democracy.

Gabriel Dax is a London-based travel writer. He’s also something of a part-time spy. His brother Sefton works for the Foreign Office and, although they are not close (“both of them recognized their essential incompatibility”), Sefton occasionally asks Gabriel for a favor — hand delivering a small package to someone in Copenhagen, for example. Gabriel’s work, including a position with a leftwing magazine, gives him an excuse to travel, and he doesn’t mind earning extra money by performing clandestine tasks that seem reasonably safe.

Gabriel is working on a book about rivers, juxtaposing familiar waters like the Mississippi and unfamiliar (to the British anyway) locales like Hattiesburg. Rivers are a familiar metaphor for the flow of a life, and Gabriel recognizes that his own runs “underground, more like a sewer than a river.”

A writing assignment for the magazine takes him to Léopoldville, in the newly independent republic of the Congo, where an old friend from university is now the Minister of Health. He records an interview with Lumumba, who rambles a bit about Eisenhower’s plot to assassinate him, spearheaded by three names Gabriel doesn’t recognize. After Lumumba is murdered, the tape recordings prove to be more dangerous for Gabriel than any clandestine work he does for his brother.

Flying back from the Congo, Gabriel notices an attractive woman reading one of his travel books. After he encounters the woman again, he learns that their meetings are not a coincidence, that she — Faith Green — is also a spy. Soon he finds himself doing favors for her. Faith sends him to Spain to purchase drawings from an artist and deliver them to someone else. The "someone else" turns out to be Kit Caldwell, the CIA station chief in Madrid. The tasks pay well and Gabriel gets a buzz from working undercover.

As the story progresses, it becomes unclear whether Caldwell is a good guy or a bad guy, but Gabriel helps him when he seems to be in a pickle, perhaps because he senses that labels don’t matter in the shadowy world of espionage. Caldwell seems to be a decent person regardless of his ideology. The truth about Caldwell comes as something of a surprise, but there are bigger surprises to come. That’s one of the joys of spy novels; characters are so often not what they seem.

The story opens with a fire that burned down Gabriel’s childhood home. Gabriel has always lived with the belief that a candle in a moon-shaped nightlight in his room caused the fire. He has untrustworthy memories of seeing his mother on the kitchen floor and knowing that she was dead before he was rescued. His adult sessions with a therapist to treat his insomnia give the reader insight into his personality. Gabriel recovers important memories after following his therapist’s advice to learn more about the events surrounding his mother’s death, developing a critical story within the larger plot.

Gabriel’s personality evolves during his relationship with Faith, about whom he becomes a bit obsessive. Gabriel gains self-confidence as he overcomes obstacles, including near-death experiences, but is he sufficiently confident to deal honestly with his attraction to Faith? The question becomes moot when he discovers her true nature — and his own.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s Moon is about the birth and maturation of a spy. By the end, Gabriel would like to return to his life as a writer, but like joining the mob, once you enter the world of espionage, there’s no way to leave. Perhaps that means that Gabriel Dax will turn up again. As a spy novel fan, I can only hope that’s true, as William Boyd knows how to mix suspense, intrigue, and amgibuity, the key ingredients of a good spy thriller.

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