Helen Fowler Writer

While the prose underpinning Gabriel’s Moon has (partly) won me over, I am afraid to report I was not thrilled by the book itself. Don’t get me wrong, Boyd has skill, writing so beautifully that even a description of the rain sparkles in his hands: ‘At Peebles the river was clear, fast and shallow, the colour of unmilked tea.’ Unmilked tea – yes, we know instantly what he means. It’s simple, bold, memorable, unusual and brave, like much of his writing. Then, further on: “. . . the street shone greasily in the rain-rinsed sunlight.” He also describes streetlights as ‘puddles of custard light.’ I can’t think of another writer who has written of the British landscape with such lyrical joy and accuracy – and, let’s face it, quite a few have tried.

One-dimensional

The problem lies in Gabriel himself. He remains a one-dimensional character, almost as flatly drawn as his clichéd love interest, the mysterious Faith Green, who comes across at points as a caricature belonging in a James Bond movie. The kind of woman set to become an imperious old lady when enough time has passed. At least we are spared near-hourly updates on Faith’s waterworks, though, whereas Boyd suffers no such inhibition when it comes to Gabriel, seeming obliged to tell us every time the man passes water. This happens often. It is tedious.

The book pulls us along with stories of foreign adventure, spying, love, sex, escapades and other tomfoolery. Even with all my doubts, I felt almost unable to put the novel down for long, though some of that was out of duty; we chose it for book group discussion.

Drive and acumen

In among visits to the loo, Gabriel is writing on what sounds like unpromising ground, a tome about unrelated rivers. How did he pitch it without a storyline, I wondered? Another quibble: Gabriel is an intelligent, thoughtful man, with a back story containing just enough torment to give him the drive and acumen I’m guessing you’d need as a fictional international spy. Yet he’s never kicked his Gitanes habit. Making him smoke that kind of cigarette feels pretty lazy, unless there’s a twist relating to the smokes. Guys in the 1980s (my era) used to smoke fags like that to look hip and attract women, doing so with varying degrees of success. I was hoping for more inventive characterisation.

When it comes to his behaviour, Gabriel is no saint, bless him, and nowhere is this shown more clearly than in his relationship with Lorraine, a young woman much younger than him who takes inexplicable pride in bedding him. Despite her enthusiasm, Gabriel refuses to let her move in with him.

Loitering in the undergrowth

On first meeting Faith, we see her drill Gabriel with disdain. It is a surprise when Gabriel begins to fall in love with her. When he takes leave of his senses and starts stalking Faith, he moves into something much more sinister, even following her and her boyfriend to where they are staying, loitering in the undergrowth outside their rented home.

To give her credit, Faith is neither frightened nor even just put out by Gabriel’s behaviour, however it’s a sang-froid I find unbelievable.

Be realistic

Boyd’s views of travel writers also seem improbable, exalted. “You’re a travel writer, an excellent one. Highly regarded. No-one’s going to come after you, for God’s sweet sake. Be realistic,” says one character. I’m sorry to say it, but all sorts of people complain to and about travel writers. All the time.

The writing is so beautiful the absence of plausible characters and plot hardly matters: “Gabriel stood in the frangipani’s dappled shade, a breeze fingering his hair although the gusts were warmly wet, almost liquefying, he thought, and the scent of the sun-basted blossom was thickly present, intense, almost palpable.”

A heavy hand

At points, also, what plotting there is risks being too heavily sign posted, as when the adult Gabriel is on a flight to Brussels after interviewing Congo’s President Lumumba. He notes the ‘coincidence’ of spotting a woman on the same flight reading, wait for it, you will never guess, his book. Extraordinary. Okay, fine in the first mention to make us suspicious, but Boyd then repeats it.

It’s unconvincing as a portrayal of journalism, and I write as one who spent many years grafting on newspapers and magazines. Gabriel seems haphazard about even the basics of the trade. “Thank God he’d had the foresight to bring his tape recorder on this trip,” he thinks at one point. He might have been sacked for not having a working recorder, or other credible means of reproducing the interview. He certainly wouldn’t have been setting up and testing the machine in the first few minutes of an interview with a country’s president, either.

Luscious prose. Silly and fun. Shallow characterisation spoils things a bit.

William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon, Penguin, 2024