The Predicament

The Predicament, William Boyd’s second book in the Gabriel Dax literary thriller series, once again plunges into the murky underbelly of the Cold War. Gabriel Dax is a hapless travel writer co-opted into the MI6 world that’s less James Bond glamour and more a lamb-to-the-slaughter farce of moral quicksand and corporate puppeteering. Boyd has elevated this spy thriller beyond the level of plot to a commentary on neocolonialism’s lingering scars, using vividly created characters and engaging humour.

Having just left behind the compromising corpse from Gabriel’s Moon that shackled him to MI6’s ongoing whims, Dax finds himself co-opted into a Guatemala gig that’s ostensibly about profiling a leftist leader for a conservative magazine. Echoing the real CIA-orchestrated 1954 coup and the 1963 military takeover designed to thwart democratic impulses, Boyd masterfully uses the setting to skewer corporate imperialism, with the “multinational fruit business” that earned Guatemala its banana republic nomenclature. The thinly veiled United Fruit Company stands as a symbol of American meddling that devastated nations in debt-trapping schemes, under the guise of anti-communist heroism. Espionage in Boyd’s new novel isn’t a case of noble intrigue but a chaotic web where superpowers prop up regimes, leaving locals and reluctant pawns like Dax in the crossfire.

Dax himself is the beating heart of this predicament, a successful yet ambivalent wordsmith navigating double agent suspicions from the KGB and CIA assignments, while opportunistically adding the final rivers to his latest book Rivers while on assignments. On the Beaten Track, his next literary project, is mocked by his handler Faith, just as his lazy trope-twisting mirrors his hapless spy life. Much of the humour centres on the protagonist’s craft being as precarious as his spy activity. Dax also dodges plagiarism accusations from a literary idol as he skims surfaces with travel guides and chance encounters, while his “accidental heroism” in Berlin averts a threat to Kennedy’s iconic visit, only to defeated by the irony of history. Boyd creates a compelling atmosphere of Berlin’s wall-shadowed paranoia and Guatemala’s volatile streets, in which Dax’s self-delusional humour and insomnia-fuelled doubts expose the profound political futility of the era. Espionage becomes a rigged game of coincidences, where saving one hotspot can’t rewrite the script, and ordinary people get ground up by greed masked by faux-ideology. 

For all its elegant twists and historical heft, the book stumbles in the anticlimactic epilogue: the narrative equivalent of shoving everything into a suitcase and sitting on it to zip it shut. Having said that, I admired the underlying commentary that Cold War spies were often unwilling scribes of empire’s footnotes, their predicaments as much about personal baggage as global brinkmanship. If you’re craving intelligent thriller fare, this one’s a gripping if quirky ride, leaving the reader eagerly awaiting Dax’s final bow.

The Predicament is now available at the Lane.

Gabi