Reluctant spy Gabriel shapes up as Smiley’s successor

Crime fiction devotees of John Le Carre’s enigmatic George Smiley have possibly been blessed with the emergence of an admirably intriguing successor.

Here’s hoping; fingers crossed.

He comes in the guise of Gabriel Dax.

And having read paperback editions of two of the three books already published, Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament I reckon things are looking good.

The third in the series,  recently out, is currently available only in hardback so patience is being sorely tested.

Gabriel’s creator, author William Boyd, weaves a clever, puzzling tale of his man’s baffling existence; baffling to himself and thus to us, the readers. But enjoyably so.

Gabriel eschews the high voltage action and technical wizardry of so many of today’s espionage practitioners.  But his seductive agility rivals anything attributed to 007.

He hovers between a clematis-adorned cottage in rural Sussex and frequent visits to London, never quite sure which environment pleases him the most.  And when discontented with both he wanders around the world gathering material for his basic real-life role as a reasonably successful writer of travel books and articles.

He is not one for the wham-bang blood baths and brutality that pepper the current era’s numerous tales of the dark art of global spies and their masters.  Technology that is so often a substitute for human action or interaction tends to pass him by.

Nonetheless, Gabriel does manage to shoot and kill a person of interest to the security forces in the US and Britain and dump the man’s body in the seas off Scotland.  And from this modest off-camera incident, the body count relentlessly rises the further he is led into a maze of duplicity.

It was an event for which he strongly denies any responsibility. Or even the ability and nerve to undertake such a deadly deed.

Only later is it revealed that he has been put through an intensive course on self-defence and unarmed combat. Things are never quite what they purport to be in Gabriel’s world.

As a result he is thrust into several closely dangerous encounters with the dubious characters populating the South American republic’s political and economic sectors.

He is in Guatemala at the behest of Faith Green, one of the several women who float in and out of his life. Her domain is secreted  behind the doors of non-existent Office of Developemental Studies and Gabriel refers to her as his handler.

She supervises his liaisons with two Russian women, Varvara and Natalie, who provide him with a steady and lucrative supply of banknotes in return for information. which he passes on to Faith Green.

Their most recent demand being for  all he can garner on Faith Green.

And from them he gathers updates on a British defector now living the good lfe under the eyes of Russia’s KGB.

Duplicity swirls around him. It is a mantle he hints at wearing  with  unease and reluctance.

Something which he suggests disturbs him greatly,  he confides in regular sessions with analyst Dr Katerina Haas whose reports on their meetings are another revealing part of this tantalising tale.

This is the era of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Guatemala’s gangster president Guzman, the excessive power of the CIA and wholesale mistrust between governments and their leaders. And all the detail of world events is seamlessly threaded through the narrative.

This include the famous visit to Berlin (and its infamous Wall) by JFK, the US President.  Gabriel becomes part of the action and privvy to an insider’s role in this and, later, to the president’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald.

It is a mesmerising tale that seduces with the numerous facets of the plot – sorting the goodies from the baddies – and with the detail of the backdrop.

Mental skulduggery abounds; Gabriel’s baffled bemusement is far from as unknowing as many assume to their cost.

Beautifully constructed prose, entrancing with its clarity, adds to the sheer pleasure of both novels.

They provide a window into the customs, habits, mannerisms and lifestyles of our recent past combined with all that is best in crime fiction