Shortly after leading the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence in June 1960, the country’s first prime minster, Patrice Lumumba, was overthrown and murdered. Lumumba, whom Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent”, had given a spine-tingling speech on the day of independence, upbraiding the country’s former colonial power, Belgium, for its despotic and racist rule. This – and his suspected openness to cooperation with the Soviet Union – may have sealed his destiny. His premiership lasted ten weeks. Lumumba’s spirit of defiance is still evident in the chilling newsreel footage of him being held captive by his political opponents shortly before his death.
The question of western involvement in Lumumba’s murder has hung over those events ever since and forms the backdrop to William Boyd’s new novel, Gabriel’s Moon, the first in an intended series. It centres on a young British journalist called Gabriel Dax who is on assignment in Africa at the dawn of the 1960s. Gabriel, orphaned in odd circumstances, has flourished in spite of this early tragedy and grown up to become a successful travel writer. (The novel pokes mild fun at Gabriel’s self-regard and the apparently purple prose of his books, listed in a bibliography at the end of the book.) Returning to London, he finds the recordings he’s made of an interview with Lumumba bear accidental witness to the conspiracy surrounding his overthrow. Now courted by shadowy intelligence officers, Gabriel is drawn deeper into the double-crossing world of cold war spycraft, pressured into further assignments and ends up on missions behind the iron curtain – all while negotiating the legacy of his early childhood trauma with an enigmatic psychoanalyst called Dr Katerina Haas.
Gabriel’s Moon, Boyd’s 18th novel, skilfully performs double duty: working as a satisfying standalone story and setting Gabriel up for further escapades. The book is a vivid re-creation of the early 1960s, and one of the pleasures it offers is a feeling of agreeable time travel to fascinating corners of a vanished world. These are conveyed with a filmic vibrancy. An accomplished screenwriter, Boyd fashions his story out of strongly visual and involving scenes. He notices key details of dress and surroundings, and whether setting the action in Léopoldville, Poland or a Chelsea pub, he is able to create that mysterious and insufficiently praised novelistic illusion whereby the reader closes the book with an odd sensation of having borne witness to the events described. I particularly enjoyed Gabriel’s visits to Franco-era Spain, a place of dusty and oppressive glamour, where he eats well, consorts with ambiguous contacts, and is never quite sure if he’s an agent or a patsy. We are also, somehow reassuringly, in an era of newsreels and analogue technology, where the news of an assassination takes weeks to be confirmed and essential tools in a spy’s armoury are road maps and coins for the payphone.
The novel bears many of the hallmarks and preoccupations of Boyd’s previous work: artfully interlocking story strands, gentle humour, rootless young men trying to find their place in the world, the intersection of individual lives with historical events. There’s a strong echo – almost an Easter egg – harking back to Boyd’s second novel, An Ice Cream War, which also featured African landscapes and a central character called Gabriel with brother issues. That novel’s long timeline and big cast of characters gave it its narrative heft. Gabriel’s Moon focuses intensely on one episode in the life of its sole protagonist, who has a huge suite of challenges to overcome.
In addition to the mystery of the Lumumba assassination, there’s Gabriel’s current literary project (a gimmicky nonfiction book about the great rivers of the world), his insomnia (rooted in his early bereavement), that tricky relationship with his brother, his ambivalent feelings towards his handler, and umpteen puzzles to figure out about the true motivation of other characters. There is also a challenging assignment to communist Poland with a scouse fellow-traveller, leftwing magazine publishers with inscrutable allegiances, stakeouts and at least two femmes fatales. And as if that wasn’t enough, Gabriel’s bachelor flat off the King’s Road is infested with mice.
Although offered as a novel of espionage, Gabriel’s Moon is light on the spycraft and office politics that are a traditional feature of the genre. A clue to this preference perhaps lies in something that Boyd wrote elsewhere. In an essay on Ian Fleming, Boyd – who has written his own Bond book, Solo – described his youthful enthusiasm for the James Bond novels and their heady but slightly toxic cocktail of “snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods”. It’s telling, I think, that Gabriel’s Moon rejects almost every single one of these ingredients. Gabriel is in a relationship with a likable waitress from the local Wimpy. Her wide-boy locksmith brother is one of Gabriel’s key allies. The travel, though exotic, is conscientiously and realistically done. In Spain, he gets around in a Simca Aronde rather than an Aston Martin with bespoke weaponry. In the more mundane surroundings of Southwold, Gabriel makes do with a £3 secondhand bicycle. And of course, instead of the baroque baddies of Bond, we face the more disquieting ambiguities of cold war realpolitik and the still-troubling question of who ordered Lumumba’s death.
Though it’s thoughtful and involving rather than out-and-out thrilling, I read this novel with huge enjoyment – looking forward to my appointments with Gabriel’s complicated life and the unfolding evidence of cold war skullduggery. The book succeeds in establishing Gabriel Dax’s world and whetting the reader’s appetite for further adventures in the Simca Aronde.It made me nostalgic not only for the period it described, but for a time when more people, including me, instinctively sought entertainment in naturalistic fiction of this kind.
• Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
