Literary maestro William Boyd returns with more fast-paced spycraft

6 days ago 5

By Peter Craven

September 10, 2025 — 5.30am

FICTION
The Predicament
William Boyd
Penguin Random House, $34.99

William Boyd is one of those writers who all manner of people will drop what they’re doing to devour as if he were Shakespeare and Ian Fleming rolled into one.

Boyd can write elegantly and he can tell a story. As a highly literate literary maestro he can discourse with accuracy about the greatness of Chekhov but beyond this, you can sometimes be left bewildered at what’s going on and why. He’s at work on a spy trilogy, and The Predicament follows on from last year’s Gabriel’s Moon and should be read after it.

The hero is Gabriel Dax, a travel writer who finds himself coerced into being a spy. Gabriel’s Moon touched on the fire of his childhood, his dealings with his analyst, the way his brother was put out of the picture, a double-agent figure (who turns out to be something more) and Gabriel’s proliferating confessions, many coloured and bewildering, sometimes way past the point of probability even for an espionage story which is mingled with Gabriel’s quest for the enigma of his own identity.

The Predicament gives us more of this, and it has the same breathless quality. Gabriel is told he must go to Guatemala to meet and interview a saintly priest who is also a benign lord of power. But what about the message which would alone allow the key to turn in the lock? What about the spectre of assassination? What do we make of the smiling CIA chief or the sinister and shadowed Italo-American and his coffee dealer?

And what about the woman high in the ranks of the British Secret Service who Gabriel is in love with, and who dallies affectionately and seductively with him at one point when she needs to go into hiding? She is a vibrant sketch of a character.

Then there’s the psychoanalyst, analysed by Freud himself (though now she is a follower of Adler): at one point Gabriel has an intense sexual dream about her. Their sessions are set out like the dialogue of a play and have a magnetic, unpredictable quality that creates so many spotlit moments of relief by contrast so that the reader hurtles on.

This is part of the trick with William Boyd’s Gabriel books: they are forever previewing an action they cannot disclose so that the narrative is a zigzag of momentary realisation that flashes with a brilliance which turns out to lead to some more or less hair-raising cul-de-sac.

There’s a stray girl in love with Gabriel, but to no avail. There’s someone – is he an Ulsterman? – who teaches Gabriel how to cause maximum damage to any potential assailant. The time is 1963 and Boyd captures it superbly with remote echoes of the Beatles singing “She loves you, yeah, yeah…” and at the same time there is the shadow of one of the most dramatically momentous events in history, to which any detailed allusion would betray.

It’s enough to say that Gabriel finds himself in Berlin with a beautiful boyish American girl – a more appropriate potential partner than the older woman spy-mistress of his dreams. But The Predicament is weird beyond belief. It’s as though a very grandly conceived transfiguration of spy larking and adventure were reduced to a set of prose haiku. Boyd has a glittering pocket full of these literary gems, and they flash into narrative life – he gives a piece of jade to his ambivalent lady-love – but he only has the energy for the narrative moment, not for a linked narrative. Or, if you want to savour the illusion of linkages, you have to take the assertion of narrative connection on faith.

Does this make this a matter of “these fragments I have shored against my ruin”? Well, in one way it does, so that The Predicament is all colour and echo and pattern. It is, if you like, a wilful attempt to circumvent the shimmering illusion of its own dumbfoundingly variable plot. For a discernible horde of readers this is liable to be enough. The Predicament, like its predecessor, and presumably its successor, plays leapfrog with its storytelling.

It’s a book that asks for two opposite forms of indulgence. It needs to be read in the shortest space of time but – paradoxically – with maximum attention.

It’s not hard to see the influence of le Carré and Brian Moore. In the Gabriel books Boyd enchants the reader even as he disappoints the expectations he sets up. But think of a moment in Berlin in 1963. Something can apparently be prevented for its moment eventually to come.

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