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Best-selling author William Boyd’s latest Gabriel’s Moon, is his fourth fictional foray into the world of espionage.
Boyd is the author of eighteen novels, including Solo – a James Bond follow-up – and A Good Man in Africa, winner of a slew of awards including the Whitbread, and has previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Gabriel’s Moon is set in 1960s London, home to accidental spy Gabriel Dax, a new insomniac exploration writer haunted by tragic memories and targeted by MI6.
Writing about the spying in the 1960s appeals to him, Boyd tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
“I think the Cold battle is the kind of great moment of spying, and also it’s analogue spying. It’s not online spying as it is today.
“Spying today is basically about surveillance, overhearing, listening into the traffic of the electronic, online world.
“But back in the ’60s, you needed agents in the field. You needed audiences with talent and guile, and if you wanted to make a phone call, you had to find a phone box and position money into the telephone in order to communicate.”
Boyd plots and plans his novels meticulously before he sits down to write a word, he said.
“I’m a great planner. Some writers just begin writing and hope that the Muse will descend every day and inspire them.
“But I like to spend even longer thinking out and inventing a novel than I do writing it. Sometimes it takes me a year to figure out the novel I’m going to write, and I need to have a location, I need to have the finish in mind before I begin at the onset.
“And sometimes, in some cases, I’ve actually written the final paragraph of the novel before I started on page one because I know exactly the kind of tone, the kind of catharsis I’m seeking.”
That sense of a location gives him confidence, he said.
“It’s dogged writing a novel, it takes so long, and I have no excuse not to write because I’ve made all the plans in advance. So even if I’m not feeling like it, I have to sit down and do the day’s allotted writing.
“And slowly but surely, the book gets written.”
For Solo – his James Bond follow up – he returned to Ian Fleming’s books rather than the various film portrayals of Bond, Boyd said, and a rather different character from the mythic hero emerged.
“For example, Bond is a nervous flyer. Bond knows a lot about women’s fashion, he doesn’t like women who paint their fingernails. Sometimes, when he sees something particularly gruesome, he’ll vomit.
“He’s also a functioning alcoholic, which is very clear from the novels. There’s a wonderful line, I think it’s in You Only exist Twice where the paragraph starts Bond realised that the 13th large whiskey had been a mistake.”
His character, Gabriel Dax, has encouraged Boyd to do something latest in his literary career – the sequel.
“Gabriel Dax’s adventures in the world of espionage will continue, and I’m looking forward to examining some of the real events that took place in the 60s through the lens of my fictitious spy.”
Once he had finished Gabriel’s Moon he realised there was more milage in the character, he said.
“I thought, well, the 1960s is so rich in terms of historical skullduggery, and this character’s a new man, he’s in his premature 30s, has a lot of living left in him, and so it might be interesting to view what happens to him next.
“And so I’m hoping that this trilogy, I’m planning, a trilogy of novels, will do Gabriel Dax equity.”
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