Gabriel’s Moon – William Boyd

Gabriel Dax, when the story opens in 1960, is a thirty-year-od freelance travel writer. He lives alone but has a girlfriend, Lorraine. It is a relationship he finds satisfactory but to which he is not committed. She would like to move in, but, well, he’s away a lot and there’s his nightmare induced insomnia to consider, so perhaps not, he says.

The nightmares, recurrent dreams of fire, are triggered by a childhood tragedy when he was trapped in a burning cottage, He escaped but his mother died. And the fire was attributed to his nightlight, a candle-lit lamp, the shade a model of the moon.

Back to 1960, on an innocent trip to Leopoldville he is invited to interview (despite his protestations that he is a travel writer not a foreign correspondent)  the president of Congo, who wants to place certain things on record. Events unfold from there, and things get complicated for Gabriel. He is contacted by the elegant and enigmatic Faith Green and is persuaded to undertake ‘harmless, risk-free’ and remunerative little courier services for HMG. They escalate and before long Gabriel is embroiled in plot and counter plot, with secret agents and double agents. His inclination to get out is compromised by a growing attraction to his handler, Faith Green.

Meanwhile, he is tackling his insomnia through psychotherapy sessions, leading to a re-examination of the events of the night of the fire. He traces the firemen and the loss adjustor in his search for the truth. Then there is the Lorraine issue.

It is a potent mix, expertly handled by Boyd who deftly manipulates plot, character, and atmosphere to produce a tidy read. It feels a bit Graham Greene (not a bad thing) in its style and commendable brevity. Though I did not warm to Dax as a person, the flaws-and-all character was well drawn and able to carry the sole burden of the narrative effectively.

At the end there is some unfinished business (Faith, Lorraine, the fire, a career as ‘an accidental spy’) so no surprise that two further Gabriel Dax books follow, one published, one in preparation. I suspect I will pick up them up.

Step by Step – Simon Reeve

In this autobiography, Simon Reeve tells how from an unpromising start in life he became the maker of interesting and inspiring travel documentaries.

Born in west London to working class parents, itemising his journey would spoil the read so suffice it to list some milestones: dropping out of school; teenage depression exacerbated by alcohol and drugs; unemployment; key advice from a DSS clerk; a lightbulb moment in Glencoe; an unlikely opportunity to work at The Sunday Times; the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 and the attack on the twin towers six years later; a call from Kevin Space, then one from the BBC.

How these dots join up forms the first half of the book, interesting in illustrating how serendipity may throw up chances, but talent and application is needed to benefit.

The second half of the book covers his successful early series, Meet the Stans in which he travelled the ex-soviet states of mid-Asia, and Places That Don’t Exist which covered disputed territories such as Somaliland, Transnistria, and Taiwan. This gives insights into the methods and thought process that go into his programmes, mixing light with shade, combining travelogue with investigative current affairs, and being as much about the people as the landmarks.

Throughout, Reeve exudes his trademark ‘this is how it is’ honesty, laying bare his troubled adolescence and pulling no punches on the injustices he sees in the world. His writing style is as engaging as his voice to camera, which makes for an enjoyable read.

This Must Be The Place – Maggie O’Farrell

It starts somewhere near the middle, when in 2010 Daniel Sullivan, an American on a flying visit to pick up his twenty-years deceased grandfather’s ashes, meets in the wilds of Ireland, a striking but enigmatic woman. There is an immediate connection, but it takes Daniel some time to realise that she is Claudette Wells, one-time film star who dramatically and mysteriously dropped off the radar some years previously and now lives as a recluse in Donegal with her young son.

From that point, the novel spills out in twenty-eight time-shuffled chapters, told from fifteen separate character points of view, with locations across four continents. It sounds crazy but it works magnificently as Daniel’s and Claudette’s back stories emerge and their unfolding relationship moves forward. While the narrations of Daniel and Claudette are predominant, the vignettes provided by their families, ex-partners, friends, and employees are beautifully framed and give a depth of perspective that is mesmerising.

To say more on the plot would spoil the pleasure of second-guessing the mysteries and hidden corners of the various characters’ lives as they are revealed.

Simply brilliant and highly recommended.

Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre

Operation Mincemeat was the codename of the Second World War deception plan that misled the Axis forces into believing the Allied thrust from North Africa would be aimed at Sardinia and Greece rather than the more obvious Sicily. By diverting German and Italian forces away from Sicily, the invasion met with limited resistance and rapid success.

The scheme was dreamed up in room 13 in the basement of the Admiralty by intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley and Ewan Montagu. The plan was to float ashore in Spain the body of an officer, carrying fake secret messages to Allied commanders. Franco’s Spain, though technically neutral, could be relied upon to allow the German intelligence services access to the documents before returning them, seemingly unmolested, to the British. The British would then pretend to believe their secrets were safe and the plan (fake plan) was still going ahead.

Macintyre is a leisurely guide through the two months of planning and execution, from getting the idea approved, through acquiring a suitable corpse, creating an identity, faking documents (not only the secret messages but also the ‘wallet litter’ that created family, a fiancée, debts, and a social life), transportation of the body by submarine, its discovery by Spanish fishermen, to the diplomatic and intelligence responses to the dead body in Spain and Germany.

It is all clearly explained and enlivened by pen portraits of the key players along the way, many eccentric – Cholmondeley, Montagu, and their team; the coroner, pathologist, and undertaker; the submariner; and various diplomats, spies, and military personnel.

Although told many times since the end of the war, this 2010 volume benefits from newly declassified files and recently discovered archives to provide a fuller picture, both comprehensive and entertaining.

The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

In Oregon, USA, in 1995 an old lady, terminally ill, is found scrabbling in her attic by her son. She has an open trunk of memorabilia among which is a French identity card from the Second World War in the name of Juliette Gervaise. Her son asks, who is she?

Rewind to France, 1939, in Carriveau, somewhere in the Loire Valley, where Vianne Mauriac lives. After a difficult adolescence – her mother died when Vianne was 14, her father returned from the First World War an emotional wreck, and her ten-years-younger sister, Isabelle, is a tearaway – she has found happiness with husband Antoine and eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. Of course it cannot last much longer, it is 1939 and Antoine is called up to defend France from the Nazis.

As for Isabelle, now a teenager, she has just been expelled from her latest school and is determined to live in Paris with her father. No chance. As ever, he rejects her and packs her off to her sister in Carriveau.

So much for the set-up; Vianne (26), Isabelle (16), and Sophie (8) become the household at Carriveau at the start  of the war. What follows - invasion, occupation, rationing, privation, persecution of Jews and other undesirables, billeting of German officers, resistance, reprisals, death, destruction, bravery, betrayal, torture, executions, and eventually liberation – forms the guts of the next 400 pages.

Told mainly from the point of view of the two sisters, it provides a rare female perspective on the wartime experience. And as the sisters have polar opposite personalities, it highlights the dilemma for the occupied population – grudgingly collaborate and survive, or resist at the risk death, and not merely your own.

The prose flows well enough and the narrative never stalls, but somehow I never felt immersed, it was always a story I was reading rather than living. Maybe a female reader would empathise more with the sisters’ plight.

Nevertheless, a book worth the reading.

In the Heart of the Sea – Nathaniel Philbrick

This is the true story of the Essex, a whaler out of Nantucket, and its crew of 21, which set sail in August 1819. By this time, the sperm whale population of the adjacent Atlantic had been pretty much wiped out so, for the rich pickings demanded by the ship owners, a long voyage to the Pacific via Cape Horn is needed.

There are mishaps along the way but nothing they can’t cope with, and by the spring of 1820 they are hunting off the coast of Chile. But there is word of better catches north and west, beyond the Galapagos Islands. They reach their destination in the autumn and soon commence work – routinely deploying three whaleboats each manned by six men, leaving three to mind the Essex.

On 20 November a feisty whale bites a chunk out of one whaleboat, forcing it back to the Essex. Back on board, they just have time to fix the damaged boat before they sight a huge whale heading straight for them. Unbelievably, it rams the Essex and water pours in. The men take to the mended whaleboat, and the other two boats abandon their slaughter and race back to the mother ship to join in frantic efforts to salvage food, water, navigational equipment, canvas wood and nails before the ship sinks below the water.

This leaves the men in three small boats thousands of miles from land at the mercy of unhelpful winds and currents which push them south and west further into the vast ocean. The privations they suffer and how they fare is related in grim detail. Some survive to tell the tale, and it is these first-hand accounts that Philbrick picks through to create a gripping narrative interspersed with personal details of the crew and contextual background on Nantucket and the whaling industry.

It is an approach that works well, ensuring the narrative does not become too wearing and the history is delivered in small chunks, providing the reader some respite while the men linger on, day by long day.

It was the sinking of the Essex that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, but here there is no thought of revenge for Captain Pollard, just a question of survival for himself and as many of his crew as possible.

The Black Loch – Peter May

Fin Macleod, who featured as the detective in May’s earlier Isle of Lewis trilogy, is no longer in the force, nor on the island. He is in Glasgow working for the police in a civilian role monitoring the seedier aspects of cyber-crime. It is unrewarding and is putting a strain on his marriage to Marsaili. So when one night he returns home to hear that his son, Fionnlagh, has been arrested back on Lewis for the murder of a teenaged girl, it is an easy decision to leave it all behind and head for The Isles.

He and Marsaili get the first plane to Stornoway, and Fin wastes no time in using his old contacts to establish the bones of the crime and gain access to Fionnlegh in custody. The circumstantials look bad, the forensics are likely to come back damning, and the lad himself (though at thirty hardly a lad) is uncommunicative and seemingly guilt-ridden.

Fin has no authority but that does not stop him investigating the crime. As he does, connections to his youth arise and memories of past events (some related in the earlier  Blackhouse novel, some fresh) intrude and might even have links to the girl’s murder.

It’s all good – trademark atmospheric descriptions of the Hebridean landscape and weather, gritty realism of island life, and a plot that thickens like a good stew. Fin’s parental instinct to protect his son battles with his ingrained police approach to follow the evidence. To add to the mix, Fin and Marsaili have to confront their own relationship as both stumble over old flames from their youth.

A good read. Links back to The Blackhouse are frequent and a re-read, or pre-read, would do no harm. Or just read it (it’s very good) afterwards.