“There must have been a conspiracy,” says the novelist William Boyd, after describing John F Kennedy’s assassination to me. He cites the usual clues—the film shot by Abraham Zapruder, the entry wounds, and the topography—before concluding that there must have been two (or more) gunmen. Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was privately sceptical about the investigatory Warren Commission’s final report, which said that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Therefore, says Boyd, leaning into his computer screen with his hands squeezed between his knees, “a novel is the perfect place to air these theories” about what really happened—which is what his 19th novel, The Predicament, published last September, seeks to do.
Boyd is video calling me from his Chelsea home, where his office is decorated with career memorabilia: film posters and old designs for book jackets. He moved here in 1988. “The shambles behind me,” he says, gesturing towards the floor and its excrescence of books, “is my study”. Here, he has written some 15 books.
The latest is the second instalment of an intended spy trilogy set in the 1960s, which began with Gabriel’s Moon and follows travel writer-turned-spy Gabriel Dax as he witnesses the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of a newly independent Congo. In typical Boydian fashion, Dax is buffeted by the caprices of fortune, in a meticulously rendered period setting where he partakes in real events. “I want the world of my novels to be as authentic and plausible and textured as I can make them,” he says, “and one of the ways of doing that is to use real historical events and put real people in a work of fiction”.
Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana (then part of the Gold Coast, a British colony). “The key thing about me, as opposed to other British writers,” he believes, “is that I was born and raised in Africa”. Because of this, he always felt a “strange deracination”—that of “a white boy in black Africa, but also a white West African in Britain”. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), drew on his childhood experiences and won the Somerset Maugham Award.
“All my novels have turned out pretty much as I hoped they would,” he says. “From my point of view, there isn’t a dud, which is not true of all novelists.”
Much like The Predicament, several of those novels contain spies. Why? Because, he says, they introduce “situations that are entirely common to the human race… We’ve all been lied to. We’ve betrayed people. We’ve been betrayed. We change our identity, subtly or dramatically, depending on our motivation and/or who we’re trying to impress.” That, Boyd says, is why so many great novelists have been drawn to espionage: from Conrad’s The Secret Agent in 1907, to Ian McEwan and John Banville today.
Of all the spy writers, Graham Greene is Boyd’s most obvious forebear: they share an enviable commercial success, an unfashionable devotion to plot, and a craftsman’s immunity to writer’s block (“I’m not one of those writers who sweats over the working day,” Boyd says.) But it’s Evelyn Waugh who presides over the moral framework of his novels. He paraphrases Waugh: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and he will ensure that nobody is going to be very happy for very long.”
Boyd thinks his “great theme” is luck, both good and bad. “All the bad luck I’ve had is as nothing set beside the extreme contentment of my personal life,” he says. (All of his books are dedicated to his wife Susan, whom he met as an undergraduate at Glasgow University).
He ends the call shortly before heading across London to judge the BBC National Short Story Award. “Anything can happen,” he says. “Good luck, bad luck—that ‘roll of the dice’ aspect. I’m going to the BBC later today, but maybe I’ll get run over outside Broadcasting House.” That would be bad luck, but at least it wouldn’t be an inside job.
