Odd Man Out

William Boyd’s spy in Berlin

The Predicament by William Boyd

Gabriel Dax, travel-writer, smoker of French cigarettes, reluctant spy, lover in thrall to his ‘handler,’ Faith Green, is not one of William Boyd’s best creations. He is good enough, of course, to sustain last year’s novel — Gabriel’s Moon — and now he is in another. In the previous book, Dax went to Poland, facilitated the defection of an SIS man to the Russians, and killed someone unpleasant who was threatening his life, and threw the body into the cold Baltic Sea. Dax was the puppet, the unwilling and largely unwitting marionette of Green — whose control of his emotions seemed enigmatic, total — and was in the dark more than he was in the light.

Now back home, in theory to work on his overwritten books — of which we got a few samples in Gabriel’s Moon — Dax is taking money from the KGB interleaved in translated editions of Russian classics to keep up the pretence that he is working for them.

And with the money the Russians have given him, Dax has bought a country cottage, and started to plan some more travels, some more books.

In theory, as Dax ever seems to say, he should cut the espionage out of his life. It has put him in mortal danger; it has terrified him; it has denied him all kinds of resolutions and releases. But the instructions keep arriving and, because of the nature of the work and its messenger, Dax keeps on following orders.

This novel takes him to Guatamala and, most consequentially, to Berlin. Guatamala here is a place of chaos: where there are bombings and firefights constantly, military rule seemingly coming to its end, and a populist revolt in the offing, preparing to put a socialist priest in power at the next presidential poll.

Berlin, meanwhile, is how it often appears in Cold War fiction: a bisected, bifurcated, bisexual, bipolar city, with life and good food and drink and parties and sex on one side, and guards looking through binoculars from towers on the other, hidden behind a breeze-block wall some six, seven feet high.

Being a travel writer and hack for the magazines gives Dax the perfect cover. He can venture everywhere for his bosses, wherever they like. He might follow the course of a river because he is pondering a book on rivers; he might want to visit islands, because he had decided islands are his chosen subject; and he might go to places which are painfully obvious — the places only the rubes and the tourists go — because he has decided to take a skewed, off-the-wall slant on the kinds of places anyone would visit.

An excuse could always be found or fabricated or taken too far. All this is true enough to life; it’s just as many real journalists were used as intelligence gatherers, operatives, during the last Cold War. (And as we must assume many who burlesque as travel bloggers and freelance reporters are in fact state assets in our own day and age — if we are inclined to the paranoiac.)

This is a very paranoid book. Not simply because the nature of espionage, as all writers of spy novels and films like to tell us, is mostly about deceit and double-dealing, living secret lives, keeping two sets of books and hoping never to be caught in the fraud. But also because Dax himself, as he stumbles about the world being lied to by commission and omission, seems to trip over the feet of a conspiracy in every country he visits.

It would make any man jaded. No wonder, then, that Dax relies so heavily upon his analyst, Dr Katerina Haas, to parse his strange world.

Some points of technique, if I may. I really like the sections, in this book and its predecessor, where Dax is interviewed by his analyst. They are my favourite parts of the books, and I always perked up — visibly perked up where I stood or sat — when they were about the begin. Haas is a fantastic character and Dax’s exterior monologue, when taking to her, is somehow better, fuller, richer, more convincing, often, than the interior monologue he is provided by the narrator of the novel, when the narrator decides to share Dax’s thoughts.

This is a book about real and false selves, about masks and men and women. It is quite neat to wonder whether Dax is his true self or a brushed-up, better self when he visits and analyst and, to the reader’s knowledge, does his level best to tell her everything. (Inevitable, vast security breach though this most obviously is.)

The transition between the prose of the novel and the transcripts of these tapes is seamless and elegantly done. The contents of these discussions are not path-breaking; there are few revelations. But they give the novel depth and life and flavour, and I am surprised the technique itself is seen so rarely in prose fiction, when it is so often used, indeed, over-used, in television and film.

I also enjoy the subplot in which Dax is sued for plagiarism by an old travel writer whom he once admired very deeply. I have had some encounters with lawyers lately and so much of the pointlessness and waiting that these disputes breed is captured here.

Boyd has said in interviews that he can usually take two or three years to write a novel — a period of collection, of condensation, reflection, must first occur: before it can be followed by the business of formal, final writing. But the Dax series has meant two books in as many years with, we are told, a third on the way. Boyd has said that he enjoys experiments in format and considered, for instance, publishing Trio — the story of three interconnected lives — not as one volume but as three volumes, each a different colour, contained in a slipcase, with readers told to go after them in any order they felt like attempting.

I, too, love formats and like that idea. The Dax trilogy is a twist on that notion. It could have been one book, a longer, more philosophical look at what spying does to a literary man.

But it’s better as three shorter stories, punchy, distinct. Where the same question is ever asked and never done. Can you hold two ideas in your head? Can you be two people? Can you successfully live two lives? It takes more than faith to find out.