This was a bit of a spontaneous buy. I was wandering around my local Waterstones looking for a book to fill a gap between work. Sometimes when I’m deep in a book editing job and have to hold a lot in my head as well as make notes, I find it too distracting to get deeply into a book I’ve bought as well, so little gaps in work are a welcome chance to buy a book of choice.

I was a great fan of Boyd’s early work – An Ice-Cream War, Brazzaville Beach, etc. – but haven’t taken to later books quite so well. However, here before me was a paperback of his latest book, Gabriel’s Moon, the cover full of enthusiastic reviews praising his storytelling, with an intriguing sounding ‘tale of globe-trotting adventure (Guardian)’ so I decided to give it a go.

Gabriel and I got off to a good start, the title of the book soon being explained as 6-year-old Gabriel’s night light – a glass moon globe – features in the opening paragraphs … and then is blamed for a terrible house fire that completely destroys his home, kills his mother (his father is already dead) and leaves him an orphan. We quickly jump 24 years. Gabriel is starting to make a name for himself as a travel writer; he has a cordial but fairly shallow relationship with his older brother Sefton, a civil servant; he lives alone and has a girlfriend who is fun with whom he has great sex, but she’s not someone he wants to be with for ever. Gabriel clearly has commitment problems. He suffers from severe insomnia which leads him to seek help from a psychoanalyst. With his regular nightmares of fires, it seems the house fire of his childhood must have more significance than he’s aware of and he thinks if he’s able to remember more of the night and what happened – memories he’s obviously shut down – he may be able to solve his sleep problem.

Soon though, we see him manipulated into a world of espionage. This is 1960 .. the time of the Cold War … the nuclear threat in Cuba. When Gabriel makes a trip to the newly independent Republic of Congo, his travel writing takes a political turn when he’s unexpectedly given the chance to interview the new president, who is murdered quite soon after. The interview leads him into a dark and dangerous world; a world of duplicity and deception. Suddenly it’s hard to know who he can trust: is his brother really a straightforward civil servant or a spy? Are the editors and agents who find him work more than they seem? What of the psychoanalyst who confesses she doesn’t actually have any qualifications, though seems to help him? And what of his MI6 handler, Faith, who clearly can’t be trusted to tell him the truth but who he becomes more and more obsessed with and attracted to.

The novel becomes increasingly complex as Gabriel travels around the world, trying to write a new travel book while at the same time fulfilling jobs for Faith that are ever more dangerous. New people are introduced and he’s drawn more deeply into the world of spies and no one is quite what they seem. For me, there is clever complexity in the world of books and tedious complexity. Gabriel seemed increasingly to be drawn into the world of spies through naivety rather than chance or purpose. He wasn’t really a character I could admire. We don’t always have to like characters but we need to admire the ones around whom a story is based; even if they are not good people, are evil people even, there has to be some kind of strength in them that makes reading the story worthwhile; for it to make sense. Gabriel’s Moon made less and less sense as it went on. Too many intriguing possibilities were introduced but never resolved. Even the Moon: I kept feeling that there must be some kind of link to the spy story and it seemed not. Though perhaps the fire experience made Gabriel into the man who was vulnerable enough to be manipulated so badly.

Most of the reviews of this book are full of praise, though I did find the odd one more in line with my own thoughts. Some suggested that the unsatisfactory ending left things open for a sequel – but leaving books open for a sequel isn’t supposed to happen like that. You’re supposed to think the ending, the book, is so brilliant you want more. I like reading thrillers; I like reading crime novels … maybe I’m not a spy book person. But this novel left me not just cold, but hugely frustrated by its rather scattered storyline, unsatisfactory ending and unattractive characters.