Enlightened espionage

British writer William Boyd is a Booker Prize-nominated literary novelist with a knack for pacy, persuasive storytelling. In The Predicament, a 1960s-set tale of reluctant MI6 spy Gabriel Dax, he supplies his usual textured, descriptive prose but struggles to deliver a compelling and cohesive plot.

Boyd has used espionage narratives before, exploring themes of identity and deception in weighty novels such as Restless and Waiting for Sunrise. Lighter and looser, the Gabriel Dax books might be closer to what Graham Greene used to call “entertainments.”

The Predicament is the second instalment of a proposed trilogy that began with Gabriel’s Moon (2024). (You don’t need to have read that novel to understand this one — Boyd sketches in necessary plot connections — but it would enhance the character background.)

Gabriel is a travel writer, somewhat solitary, his sleep sometimes troubled by a traumatic childhood event that killed his mother. In the first Dax book, he stumbled into becoming a freelance double agent for the British secret service, his globe-trotting work providing perfect cover.

Now, his enigmatic handler and sometime lover Faith Green is sending him to Guatemala, where a rising leftist movement is clashing with the United Fruit Company, an American corporation with deep ties to the CIA. Gabriel is told to make contact with Frank Sartorius, the seemingly amiable local CIA station chief.

Assassinations, riots and shady characters hanging around Gabriel’s hotel leave him suspecting some kind of international plot but unable to grasp its outlines. Returning to England by way of a risky detour in New York, Gabriel vows to give up his double life and get back to writing.

Faith pulls him back in, though, and soon he’s on assignment in Germany, where American president John F. Kennedy is about to deliver his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. More intrigue ensues.

Boyd has always been interested in how one individual life can intersect with big historical events. He deliberately writes Dax not as a slick superspy but as a conflicted, slightly hapless guy who looks at the confusion and carnage of 20th-century history and concludes, “We are helpless, powerless against these random forces.”

The Predicament sees Gabriel working on his spy skills. He learns how to lose a tail and how to pick locks. He learns how to defend himself with the contents of his pocket. (“The writer’s notebook — a deadly weapon,” says his buff fight instructor, in what could be a Boyd in-joke.)

But even as Gabriel is drawn into high-level espionage, he remains doubtful about his abilities and his role, “once again (asking) himself what in the name of reason he was doing playing these dangerous games in a foreign city.”

Boyd delves into the psychological cost of a spy’s dual existence through transcribed sessions between Gabriel and his somewhat unorthodox psychotherapist Katerina Haas, who brings up the idea of the “false self,” the “real self” and their tricky interplay. That’s also a notion that comes out in Gabriel’s increasingly complicated, mostly unrequited obsession with the cool, competent, completely unreadable Faith.

Moving from rural England to New York to Cold War-era West Berlin, Boyd fills in local atmosphere and period detail with practiced ease. But Gabriel’s ambivalent thoughts and feelings can be a bit repetitive and, as good as many of the standalone scenes are, they never add up to an exciting espionage plot.

This could partly be a structural problem common to trilogies, where the middle book often ends up slumping a bit, stranded between the world-building novelty of the first and the (hopefully) climactic conclusion of the last.

The Predicament is often engaging and entertaining, but the reader might sometimes be left wondering, as Gabriel himself does at one point, “What exactly is the point of all this effortful subterfuge?”

Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Free Press.