In John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), MI6’s ‘Control’ informs the burnt-out spy Leamas, ‘We have to live without sympathy, don’t we?’ before acknowledging, ‘That’s impossible, of course … we aren’t like that really … one has to come in from the cold.’ William Boyd, a vocal admirer of le Carré, places this dichotomy at the centre of his ongoing series. Gabriel Dax is a travel writer co-opted by MI6. Whereas Gabriel’s brother Sefton had been ‘wilfully caught up in the dark world of betrayal and duplicity’ and paid ‘the ultimate price’, Gabriel is an ‘accidental spy’. The Predicament, continuing from the bestselling Gabriel’s Moon (2024), is both a jeu d’esprit and a psychological case study in which Gabriel, traumatised by a loss in childhood, ricochets between his ‘real’ and ‘false’ selves, seeking stability then abandoning it. 

Boyd was raised in Ghana and Nigeria, and educated in Scotland, France and Oxford; his protagonists are at home everywhere and nowhere. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), opened the way to a wide range of settings: Vienna, Los Angeles, St Petersburg, Montevideo. Gabriel’s Moon took readers to the newly independent Congo and the 1961 assassination of its great democratic hope, Patrice Lumumba, and from there to Cold War Spain. The Predicament embeds itself in two cataclysmic moments which both took place in 1963: the coup in Guatemala and the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech which John F Kennedy addressed to an estimated half a million people.  

Espionage fiction tantalises the reader, luring them to second-guess, predict, misconstrue. In earlier spy fiction, such as Waiting for Sunrise (2012) and his authorised James Bond sequel, Solo (2013), Boyd displays immense formal virtuosity. But he has also described himself as essentially a comic writer, and The Predicament is on