Gabriel's Moon
...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.
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...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.
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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.
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