Full moon

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2025 (369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gabriel’s Moon is the 17th novel by internationally bestselling author William Boyd, whose previous books have been longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Los Angeles Times book award for fiction and the Costa Book Award. Born in Ghana and raised in Nigeria, Boyd now divides his time between London, England and southwest France.

Boyd’s latest is an international thriller set mainly in Europe in the early 1960s. It begins, however, in the brand-new Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the protagonist, travel writer and journalist Gabriel Dax, is interviewing its first (real-life) prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel returns home to London to submit his article, only to learn that there has been a coup and Lumumba has been placed under house arrest. Subsequently, Gabriel learns Lumumba is dead.

What follows is a web of intrigue, as unknown parties make desperate attempts to find Gabriel’s tapes of his interview of Lumumba, and a mysterious woman named Faith Green recruits him to pass along secret messages via the transfer of a painting in Spain. At the same time, Gabriel wrestles with his traumatic memories: of a fire that occurred during his childhood 25 years earlier and which killed his mother; with his ambivalent feelings towards his older brother, a spy for the British intelligence agency M15; with his flagging feelings for his girlfriend, Lorraine and his growing attraction to Faith Green; and with a mouse infestation in his flat. Gabriel is a fully developed character with as many layers as the plot.

As Gabriel is pulled deeper into the world of spy craft, he learns just how many people are not who they seem; there are double and triple agents, plots and subplots. Gabriel’s futile efforts to catch the mouse which roams his flat are a clever reflection of his attempts to understand who killed Lumumba and, even more crucially, who (if anyone) he can trust. As he tries to determine the truth of Lumumba’s fate, Gabriel also struggles to understand what happened during the fatal house fire of his childhood. He also engages in his own clumsy espionage in an attempt to learn more about Faith Green. Ultimately, he is sent on another mission to Warsaw, which turns deadly, as personal and familial tensions meet the larger conflicts between nations and ideologies.

Gabriel’s Moon is set in the early days of the Cold War, with all the anxiety of that era. It is an analogue society, where information is learned from newspapers and phone calls, and messages passed through artwork and person-to-person contact. The world of the novel is simpler than ours not just in terms of technology, but also because it is clear from who and from where threats come.

Women are also living in an age where they are afforded more independence, and Boyd’s female characters are richly drawn people in their own right, holding significant roles beyond simply being sexually attractive to men.

Boyd does an excellent job of painting a broader picture of this historical context while also weaving together the detailed strands of his intricate narrative. While there are a lot of people involved, the story never becomes confusing, perhaps because it doesn’t move as quickly as other books in the thriller genre. The author pays as much attention to character as to plot. The writing is assured and elegant, making Gabriel’s Moon an excellent choice for those who like literary thrillers with moments of both action and reflection.

Though the cover blurb implies that the story will be centred around the assassination of Lumumba (which interested this reviewer), that story fades into the background fairly early on, and the novel goes on to explore other events. However, by the end, the Lumumba mystery is resolved, as have all other questions and conflicts in the narrative. Refreshingly, the resolution in this satisfying, pleasurable read doesn’t come via a lengthy monologue by the “bad guy,” as often happens in the genre.

Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide will be published in April.