William Boyd is considered one of the greatest living English writers, capable like few others of frequenting different genres in his vast production that began way back in 1981. Among his novels there are dramatic works, romantic stories tinged with a pinch of surrealism, psychological dramas. His latest book published in Italy, La luna di Gabriel (Neri Pozza, 2025, pp. 304, also e-book) instead winks at the best spy stories of John le Carré, Tom Clancy, without forgetting Ian Fleming, at least for certain settings.
We are, in fact, in London in 1960, in the midst of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union . The British secret services are still in shock and paranoia over the betrayal of the so-called Cambridge Five. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union's secret services coordinated by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the ancestor of the very famous KGB, had, in fact, started a campaign to recruit young scions of the British establishment to use as spies. The fulcrum of the project was the University of Cambridge where the Soviets could count on a fifth column, the Marxist-inspired economist Maurice Dobb, professor emeritus of Trinity College . Thanks to his advice, in a short time the NKVD managed to recruit those who have gone down in history as the "Magnificent Five" or the "Cambridge Five": a group of five young students destined for important roles in English society and politics of the time . Thanks to their assignments, the “Five” were able to pass important military and industrial information to the Soviet Union for about twenty years. The Cambridge Five network began to be dismantled only in 1951, but it had caused much damage to Western governments and deep embarrassment to Her Britannic Majesty's counterespionage.
In this climate of spy paranoia, we meet Gabriel Dax, a thirty-year-old obsessed with memories of the fire that killed his mother when he was just a child . Very high flames, coming from the candle that he lit every night next to his bed, before going to sleep, and covered with a glass globe: the "Gabriel's moon". Now Gabriel, an improvised reporter, writes about travel, in addition to carrying out occasional "favors" for his brother, an employee at the Foreign Office: deliveries, messages, newspapers purposely left on carefully selected benches. But the flames continue to chase him, at least in his dreams. One day, one of his trips takes him to Congo where, due to unforeseeable contingencies, he finds himself interviewing Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel knows little or nothing about politics, he is too naive to understand the meaning of their meeting, but what at first seems like beginner's luck soon turns into a tangle of oddities and coincidences that soon shows a disturbing side. Because in the midst of the Cold War, the line that divides a traveler from a spy is really thin. So, almost by chance, aided by the sense of guilt that never leaves him, Gabriel Dax finds himself entangled in a web of secrets that all gravitate around a mysterious and elusive MI6 agent, Faith Green. Faith who ensnares the young man in a relationship with no escape route, as Boyd outlines in a few, illuminating lines: "You'll have the usual reward. Tomorrow I'll bring you the drawing," added Faith, "and I'll explain everything." "Okay," said Gabriel, a little sulky. I'm your slave." "No," she said. "You're my spy. Don't you remember?"
Thus, from sunny Cadiz to the frozen squares of Warsaw, to the vibrant streets of Swinging London, unexpected passions, legitimate paranoia and real dangers will accompany the adventures of Gabriel Dax, a reluctant hero, an unsuspected spy, an ordinary man. A man, however, alone with his own questions: "Did my mother really die because of me? Am I really doing the right thing? Will I ever be able to get out of the game?... And, above all, who can I really trust!?".
