The story of Gabriel Dax, a travel writer tormented by the trauma of youth, struggling with insomnia and alcoholism, who is looking for meaning and resolution---and who finds it through psychoanalysis and active participation in the espionage games of the cold war.
Set in the 60s, the tale starts with an encounter with Lumumba, ill-fated head of the DRC. Lumumba is assassinated soon after, and Gabriel has in his possession crucial incriminating evidence. He is drawn into a succession of international operations, never fully acknowledging to himself that his role has evolved from occasional outings taken at his discretion, to wholly committed and enmeshed.
Gabriel narrates, and is confident and optimistic---perhaps deluded---throughout. His drinking comes increasingly to the fore, reaching almost alarming levels, but he remains a reliable narrator. He is impelled by various opaque---or perhaps occluded---forces: the partial memory of his mother's death in a fire when he was six; strange repeated encounters with agents of MI6 and missions which seem without discernible purpose; and---most enjoyably---the strange attraction and influence which his principal handler, Faith Green wields over him.
These mysterious forces are presented against the backdrop of the stable, grounded life with Gabriel is trying to sustain: long days of solitary writing, a relationship of convenience with a local waitress and her dubious brother, and mice in the home. Gabriel strives to advance his travel writing, visiting Chapelizod and conceiving grand designs for future books (which are slightly banal: rivers! great trees!), but at the last is irrevocably in the grip of the service.
The book was widely and very favourably reviewed, especially for the quality of the writing and the cinematic 'mis en scene' (Boyd enjoys success as a screenwriter as well as a novelist). This elements passed me by, alas, though the presentation of the world in the sixties was vivid. A sequel is promised.
Curiously, there is a real-world Gabriel Dax having a connection with the DRC: ("Forest and Vegetation Monitoring Using Sentinel-2 Imagery in the Northern Part of Democratic Republic of Congo"); he seems to be a high-altitude imaging scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute.
I think my first exposure to Boyd was "Killing Lizards", a four-story collection in the "Penguin 60s" series published in 1995. I would have read it about then; the details are lost to me but something remains of the atmosphere of heat and strangeness.
Boyd was born to Scottish parents in Ghana (then Gold Coast) in 1952. He attended school in Gordonstoun and university in France. He now divides his time between Chelsea and the Dordogne.
I bought the book as part of a mini-spree triggered by the post-Christmas reductions in Dubray Books, in Rathmines.