You don’t necessarily think of William Boyd as an author of spy novels – not in the way you would think of John le Carré or Charles Cumming – but he returns again and again to the secret world in his writing. In 2013, he wrote a Bond novel, Solo, which saw the spy travel to Nigeria, where the author grew up. Writing a character who embraces espionage so wholeheartedly seemed to highlight the way in which the agents in the rest of the Boyd oeuvre tend to be pulled into the secret service reluctantly, their subterfuge speaking of deeper personal struggles.
Gabriel Dax lives in the shadow of an early tragedy. As a child, his house burnt to the ground; he escaped, but his mother died. He is tormented by flaming nightmares, drinks too much, refuses to commit to his working-class girlfriend, Lorraine, who works in a Wimpy and whom he finds “incredibly, tumescently alluring”.
