Patrice Lumumba

Gabriel’s Moon is William Boyd’s eighteenth novel, swiftly following last year’s The Romantic, which delightfully described the adventures of a man living through the nineteenth century in Europe. Though Boyd relates a smaller section of his new hero’s life here, many of his characteristic themes are fully at play: surveillance, deception, honor, love, art, fraud, real historical characters jostling with fictional ones, and relationships between mothers and sons. Essentially, this new book is a spy story, well within the lineage of John le Carré (complete with liberal ambivalence about duty to one’s country), and with skillfully handled layers of double-dealing.

As everybody knows, as soon as you start to talk to any historian of postwar life in any Latin American or African or Southeast Asian country, the discussion quickly turns to the role of the CIA in subverting democracy. From the Truman-era coups in Syria and Egypt, through regime change in Guatemala, assassination in the Dominican Republic, the fomenting of industrial unrest in Guyana, and both the military and covert US involvement in Vietnam, it seems overseas intrigue was the rule and long periods of benign neglect the exception.