William Boyd’s new spy novel is full of JFK conspiracy theories
“I’m just a patsy,” claimed Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F Kennedy’s killer, on November 22, 1963. It was a phrase that launched a thousand conspiracy theories, helped by the fact that Oswald never had to flesh out his argument since he was murdered on live television two days later.
Oswald is not a character in William Boyd’s latest Cold War thriller, but his words seem to reverberate in the plot, which takes place in that same fateful year in 1963. For the novel’s hero, Gabriel Dax, a 33-year-old English travel writer turned spy for MI6, “I’m just a patsy” is less a desperate excuse and more of a sickening realisation.
“He felt like some sort of indentured servant — wash the dishes in the scullery and then mop the floors upstairs,” Dax thinks after receiving orders from Faith Green, his bewitching handler. He would rather be off writing a florid book about the world’s great rivers, yet here he is interviewing foreign dignitaries and relaying secret messages for purposes he can only dimly comprehend.
Dax’s adventures are comfortingly retro with their Sixties world of telegrams and payphones, femmes fatales and hefty book advances, and fortified by near-constant drinking and smoking. Boyd also adds a grimy comic edge, perhaps inspired by the flatulent imagination of Mick Herron in his Slow Horses series; here, agents take their target practice lessons on a chicken farm in Leyton, while a hardback travel guide becomes a bludgeon in a pinch.
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The Predicament is the second in a planned trilogy after Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon, and contains a host of predicaments for Dax. First, there are his efforts to keep a British triple agent safe in Moscow, which mainly involves spending the Russians’ money “extravagantly” so they think he is on their side. Then there is his successful literary career, which is suddenly under threat after an older writer, one of his heroes, sues him for plagiarism.
Dax’s biggest source of frustration, however, is his love life, where he is “swithering between an agreeable reality” (his ex-girlfriend) and the “unattainable fantasy” of Faith. Dax is unhealthily obsessed with his boss, who calls him “my spy” to make clear where the power lies in their “maddening, compulsive” relationship. Yet there is a glint of promise: she is newly single again, having broken off her engagement to another man.
President John F Kennedy minutes before his assassination in 1963
ALAMY
In contrast to Gabriel’s Moon, which took a while to find its footing, the action of The Predicament surges along. After some cursory self-defence training, Dax is dispatched to Guatemala to help the CIA to get intel on a presidential candidate, which eventually draws him into contact with the mafia and a mission to foil — wait for it — a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Boyd ups the authorial stakes by reaching for the daddy of conspiracy theories, putting his book in dialogue not only with famous fictional accounts of JFK’s assassination like Don DeLillo’s Libra, but also with the imaginations of every remotely conspiracy-minded reader, who has no doubt already settled on their preferred culprits for the president’s murder.
Boyd injects some novelty into this well-trodden terrain: he transposes the action five months earlier to Kennedy’s visit to neon-lit West Berlin and swaps out Oswald for a fictional gunman. He throws in all the classic Kennedy conspiracy theories, then runs with some and discards others.
The result of all this effort can only be divisive: some readers will be underwhelmed while others will feel Boyd has pushed the preposterousness too far. I found it extravagantly enjoyable, although after I finished the contrivances started to settle in my head. An ideal reading situation might be to wait for the inevitable third instalment, then devour both books in one go without time to ponder which parts are devious red herrings and which Boyd left hanging unintentionally. After all, a good thriller, like a good conspiracy theory, doesn’t have to be watertight, it just has to intrigue, flatter and entertain. That’s what Lee Harvey Oswald was counting on.
The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking £20 pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
