Often that is enough, and it will be enough for a comforting holiday read with just enough literary phrasing, historical insight and twisty plotting to lift it above the level of pulp. At no point would you say Gabriel’s Moon is a bad or mediocre novel, though it has its weak points. Dax’s affair with Lorraine seems like an older man’s indulgence, the class snobbery and sexism given cover because it is set 60 years ago. This is how things were, so let’s just enjoy it, I suppose.
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The Lumumba plot – he was assassinated in 1961 – never gets beyond playing the role of a place-holder. Gabriel’s buried trauma is predictably sorted out. At the sentence level, there is also an unevenness of register. “The room was fogged with the smoke and his moon had a flocculent wavering halo.” Flocculent? On page two? Soon, there is more meat-and-potatoes description of women by their clothing and the psychiatric sessions are reduced to transcripts as if it’s not worth bothering with any more.
The unevenness wasn’t my big question, though. I kept asking why. If you are a writer with as much proof of excellence as Boyd, why write a book that is so similar to what you, not to mention Greene and John le Carré and the many masters and mistresses of the 1960s espionage novel, have done before? Is it just that genre fiction is having its day and what many readers want is something to pass the time? Maybe that’s a good enough commercial reason and Boyd has earned the name not to have to answer.
But I’m always puzzled when the finest writers supply product. The quest for relevance, I guess, is irresistible. Boyd has set himself a task with this book, and he achieved it successfully. It just felt, however, like a thing he did between his greater things.
