There’s a stray girl in love with Gabriel, but to no avail. There’s someone – is he an Ulsterman? – who teaches Gabriel how to cause maximum damage to any potential assailant. The time is 1963 and Boyd captures it superbly with remote echoes of the Beatles singing “She loves you, yeah, yeah…” and at the same time there is the shadow of one of the most dramatically momentous events in history, to which any detailed allusion would betray.
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It’s enough to say that Gabriel finds himself in Berlin with a beautiful boyish American girl – a more appropriate potential partner than the older woman spy-mistress of his dreams. But The Predicament is weird beyond belief. It’s as though a very grandly conceived transfiguration of spy larking and adventure were reduced to a set of prose haiku. Boyd has a glittering pocket full of these literary gems, and they flash into narrative life – he gives a piece of jade to his ambivalent lady-love – but he only has the energy for the narrative moment, not for a linked narrative. Or, if you want to savour the illusion of linkages, you have to take the assertion of narrative connection on faith.
Does this make this a matter of “these fragments I have shored against my ruin”? Well, in one way it does, so that The Predicament is all colour and echo and pattern. It is, if you like, a wilful attempt to circumvent the shimmering illusion of its own dumbfoundingly variable plot. For a discernible horde of readers this is liable to be enough. The Predicament, like its predecessor, and presumably its successor, plays leapfrog with its storytelling.
It’s a book that asks for two opposite forms of indulgence. It needs to be read in the shortest space of time but – paradoxically – with maximum attention.
It’s not hard to see the influence of le Carré and Brian Moore. In the Gabriel books Boyd enchants the reader even as he disappoints the expectations he sets up. But think of a moment in Berlin in 1963. Something can apparently be prevented for its moment eventually to come.
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