Gabriel - I think of it as a literary name, a name that you'd expect to find in a novel, but rare in everyday life. So to add to my thread of literary coincidences, meeting a character called Gabriel in two different novels shouldn't be too surprising. But reading one after another there's always the danger of contamination. Fortunately though, the Gabriel or 'Gabe' of Maggie O'Farrell's excellent
Instructions for a Heatwave is radically different to William Boyd's accidental spy in
Gabriel's Moon. The similarities begin and end with the name. Both authors are leading exponents of contemporary English fiction and both do character very well, although their approaches are quite different and quite distinctive. In these two novels O'Farrell explores relationship through interaction, through inter-relation and social behaviour, and whilst this features in Boyd, he ends up taking us down a more analytical, psychological path. There are, of course, all sorts of ways that the impression of character can be conveyed. Modern novelists have often used descriptions of facial expressions and features, physical bearing and movement to identify and communicate something about character. O'Farrell has some delicate touches in describing how the family in her fiction dress - and this is important in capturing an era, principally focused on the Summer of 1976. From her I learnt what a sprigged dress is - and how well it sums up the Laura Ashley era. Some writers can't seem to hold back on this topic. Think of
Flaubert who has 'a Polish girl in a salmon-coloured velvet spencer' with a 'gauzy skirt over pearl-grey stockings encased in pink boots edged with white fur', but then again this is him describing a fancy dress ball! But in Boyd it seems overdone. A double agent in a 'crisp white shirt and Royal Artillery tie', a minor character in 'a simple, close-fitting white dress', an artist in 'an olive green cotton drill suit with a dark orange silk tie', a barman in a 'starched double-breasted jacket ', a waiter in a 'cerise jacket' and the enigmatic Faith in 'navy blue pedal-pushers with a matching short blouson jacket' - all in the space of ten pages. Is Boyd giving wardrobe instructions for some future film adaptation or is he trying to capture something of the spy genre? Or is he inventing his own genre? After all Gabriel's Moon is described as the first of a trilogy of Gabriel Dax stories. What characters wear and how they wear it can supply important detail to the reader, it can anchor them to a particular culture or point in time, but in the hands of a skilled writer it can also convey a character's age or social status and something more subtle about their relationship to the world. I'm not sure that Boyd's descriptions do any of that work, but in other respects Gabriel's Moon is a very readable book. I'll sign up for the next one.
