He re-creates the life
of the 1960s with great skill and delivers a classy, entertaining spy thriller.
(Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The Predicament is the second outing for William Boyd’s secret agent, Gabriel Dax, but there is really no need to have read the previous novel – this works fine as a stand-alone. Dax’s day job is as a travel writer, which gives him a great excuse to turn up in all sorts of places that were of importance in 1963, when the story is set.
He is also in the employ of MI6, who have got him to persuade the KGB that he is in fact a double agent.
So there are going to be plenty of
moments when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
And there are also many moments when Dax really doesn’t know what either side is up to – because they don’t tell him the whole story, ever. So, who to trust? The KGB seem to want him to visit Moscow, which he doesn’t do in this book, and also to tell them more about his MI6 handler and sometime lover, Faith Green. She sends him off to Guatemala in the guise of a journalist who wants to interview a reclusive left-wing politician. But things go badly wrong and he is caught up in a coup, but not before he has come across some very fishy people.
Still, he manages to investigate a river in Guatemala for his book on rivers, and makes it back to England to carry on with the day job, deal with a fellow writer who is accusing him of plagiarism and visit his psychiatrist, to whom he cheerfully confesses all the strands of his life, which to the reader seems like a foolish thing to do – he is a spy after all, and who knows which side she might be on.
His next assignment is to go to Berlin which is about to be visited by charismatic American president John F Kennedy. But there are plots to assassinate the president, and Dax finds himself mixed up in trying to identify – and stop - the would-be killers, for the CIA. And there is the creeping doubt about whether his spymasters are using him as a handy useful idiot, or whether they really rate his abilities, and just who it is who wants Kennedy dead.
There is a delightful, innocent amateurishness about Dax’s activities, and Boyd manages to make his novel fast-moving, funny and, particularly towards the end, dramatically tense. He re-creates the life of the 1960s with great skill and delivers a classy, entertaining spy thriller. - Margaret von Klemperer
Published by Penguin Viking: ISBN 978-0-241-76114-4
Posts
