...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 ... 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 ... 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.
...a hugely enjoyable and satisfyingly intricate historical thriller. As ever, Boyd’s evocations of time and place are deftly rendered, whether Franco-era Spain or communist Warsaw ... the novel is at its most compelling when Gabriel is either interacting with his mesmerizing and fiendishly shrewd handler or doing her bidding in foreign lands ... Boyd routinely impresses with his portrait of an individual who is in too deep emotionally and in the dark as to what is going on around him.
Boyd leads us onward, from Southwold to Warsaw, coursing out the clues like a seasoned storyteller. But though the breadcrumbs may be artfully strewn, the meatloaf of a man at the center of this farcical repast is decidedly half-baked ... The stakes escalate to the level of global crisis. Bit players are cruelly killed. Boyd conveys these plot points in expository dialogue, insulating the narrative from any real sense of danger ... By this point, one suspects that the author is in on the joke. Gabriel is a moron coated in Teflon, and his invincibility can be read as a satire of the Cold War era, when entitled men meddled with impunity in the fates of nations. Like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Gabe is the embodiment of a sick society: an antihero whom readers may love to hate ... As Gabriel’s quaint misadventures conclude, he remains adrift in his own ego, horny as a bonobo, and primed by Boyd to star in a sequel. I do see a certain nostalgic appeal. This book recalls a simpler time for men like Gabriel Dax. As the world changes, many will prefer to look backward.
Boyd used this generic template masterly in his purest spy novel to date, Restless, in which the ordinary life of Eva, its hero, is transformed and upended by her recruitment as an agent. Gabriel’s Moon is equally sure-footed, comfortably managing at once to deliver all the pleasures of the genre while also subtly undercutting and questioning them ... Boyd takes such obvious, infectious pleasure in telling his story, bounding along just in front of the reader, scattering clues and red herrings. I’m not sure that there’s a more reliably entertaining novelist working today.
...another serviceable spy story. But is that enough? Boyd is a pro: the pages turn easily and his imagination never lets us stop before dragging Gabriel to his next locus of drama and confusion — but it’s that very proficiency that is the problem. The story never settles on a scene long enough to let us go below the surface ... As with Boyd’s other recent work, he has sacrificed depth for breadth. It feels like he’s going through his hoops.
Tics aside, William Boyd is endlessly versatile, and the many readers to whom he has given such pleasure will eagerly await the next development. To my mind his best mode is comedy ... All of these novels concern likeable, if slightly roguish or bumbling, heroes who get into a hot mess, but somehow or other climb out. Hot mess is colloquially applied to women, but the author’s expertise is in male crisis, these days a rather underexamined subject.
Reading Gabriel’s Moon is a jangling experience. I finished it with an abrupt jolt of 'was that it?' tinged with 'have I missed something?' It is, and I shudder to write this, alright I suppose, but not exactly not bad ... It is all rather superficial ... Dark things happen in the course of the novel, but its flatness strips them of any emotional impact. Gabriel has an infestation of mice and I cared rather more for their fates than the human deaths. Gabriel’s Moon is similar to those limpid watercolours painted by inter-war Oxbridge undergraduates: pleasant enough, technically passable and of no great consequence.
The novel is complex, credible and compulsive, but the reader must pay close attention as various characters are revealed to be single, double and even triple agents. Indeed, one suspects that some of them, having been flipped and flipped back so often, aren’t even sure themselves who their true masters are but simply carry on, addicted to the subterfuge. Like his contemporaries Sebastian Faulks and Robert Harris, Boyd has been publishing absorbing and innovative novels for decades while somehow finding himself a little less feted than, say, McEwan, Barnes or Rushdie. This seems rather unfair as his work deserves a similar level of critical appreciation.
...in the end such objections seem beside the point in a novel so deliberately and satisfyingly stuffed with incident, Cold War history, romance and any number of mysteries, not all of them overlapping. At one stage, Faith gently mocks Gabriel (a Stendhal fan) for the fact that his travel books are ‘a bit over the top’. He defends himself by saying that ‘you have to give the full vicarious pleasure’ to the reader, and approvingly quotes Lawrence Durrell’s declaration that ‘you had to give’ travel writing the ‘full plum-pudding’. Gabriel’s Moon makes it pretty clear that, for Boyd, the same approach should also apply to the spy thriller.
A new William Boyd novel is always a pleasure, and this is a read that will keep you completely hooked to the very last page. And yet, it must be said, certain elements have a slightly by-numbers feel, particularly in its interrogation of Gabriel’s emotional back-story and in its female characters ... he has created in Gabriel Dax a man of his time, a man who treads lightly on unstable earth, his life moving forward as remorselessly as the novel in which he lives.
Boyd just keeps knocking out terrific new novels, one after the other, approximately at the rate of one every couple of years ... The overriding tone throughout is more mischievous sly humour than the gravitas of say, either Ian Fleming’s James Bond or John le Carré’s George Smiley.
Boyd doesn’t quite weave all these strands into a neat little package, but it’s still a highly entertaining book that can easily bear a few loose ends. An exceptional storyteller in fine form.
Boyd’s prose is crisp, his dialogue zings, and the heaps of dramatic irony he places on Gabriel’s stumble into spyhood buoys the narrative rather than weighing it down. Readers will hope to hear more from Gabriel soon.
