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It was all Chris Priest’s fault. I first encountered the work of William Boyd in the first of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists features, which I came to because Priest was one of the writers on the list. I found that whole enterprise intriguing, and as well as reading that issue of the magazine, I went away and read at least one book by every one of the writers featured. Some I read nothing more by (did Lisa St Aubin de Teran ever produce a second novel? If so I missed it completely, though I remember liking that first one well enough). Some I would pick up occasionally but never consistently (Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro). Some I followed for a while then quietly dropped (Ian McEwan, who really never wrote another novel to match Enduring Love). But in all there were only three writers that I’ve gone on to read everything they produce as it came out; Priest, of course, Graham Swift, and William Boyd.

I think the first novel of Boyd’s that I read was his second, An Ice Cream War, which I liked well enough to go back to A Good Man in Africa and on to Stars and Bars, but I wasn’t fully convinced until his fourth novel, The New Confessions. This one, along with his next two books, Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon, showed me a writer I wanted to follow. I found them vivid, exhilarating, fresh, I read them eagerly, compulsively, wanting more of the same while at the same time delighting in their difference. From that point on I was locked in to Boyd, through the relative disappointments (Armadillo) and the sheer brazen effrontery of Nat Tate. Since then his work has varied. There is a restlessness, as if he isn’t really sure what it is he wants to write. There were efficient contemporary spy novels (Restless, Waiting for Sunrise, even a James Bond novel, Solo), there were novels centring on artists of one sort or another (Any Human Heart, Sweet Caress, Trio), there were vivid if rather romantic historical novels (Love is Blind, The Romantic). All of these were, at worst, readable, and several of them were very good indeed even if they never quite scaled the heights of The New Confessions.

Then, a couple of years ago, there came a novel, Gabriel’s Moon, that seemed to be trying to bring together the different types of fiction he had been producing for the last several years. The central character was a writer, in this case a moderately successful travel writer and journalist. The setting was historic, the early 1960s. And the plot was a spy story mixed up with a romance: Gabriel Dax is a writer of travel books who, by a series of misadventures, finds himself caught up in an espionage plot whose ramifications he never sees in its entirety. The plot is complicated by the fact that Dax falls hopelessly in lust with the woman who is his liaison at MI6. The book is readable and engaging, but in retrospect it feels rather less than the sum of its parts.

For the first time in a long while, therefore, I began to have doubts about whether I would snap up a new William Boyd novel hot off the presses. It didn’t help when I learned that The Predicament is another Gabriel Dax novel. But, fortunately, this one is better than the first.

The story takes place between March and June 1963 (with a final chapter in November of that year). Dax is putting the finishing touches to the travel book he started in the previous novel, and publishing interest is high and lucrative, and he already has an idea for his next work. Meanwhile his involvement with MI6 has become regularised, his travels allow him to be used as a courier; while his relationship with his handler, Faith, remains as on-again-off-again as ever. And at the same time the Russians have convinced themselves he is a double agent, so regularly pay him stacks of cash which have allowed him to buy a nice cottage out in the country. There are, in all of this, too many bits of story going on to really work. The interaction with the Russians never comes to any sort of conclusion (perhaps setting the scene for volume three), and there is, for instance, a sub-plot about Dax being sued for plagiarism that is resolved so quickly and inconsequentially that you wonder why it was in the book at all.

But the main story thread is stronger and better developed than in the first book. Dax is sent to Guatemala to interview the rebel priest who is expected to win the upcoming election. In Guatemala Dax works with a CIA agent, Sartorius, and also encounters an American businessman, Furlan, who is there buying coffee for his restaurant chain. The interview proves abortive, but no sooner has Dax returned to Guatemala City than the priest is assassinated. A shady character who Dax had seen with Furlan is then killed, and is subsequently identified as the assassin. Not long after returning home, Dax is sent on another mission, to Berlin, where John F. Kennedy is due to visit. The CIA is now suspicious of Furlan, and since Dax is the only person known to have met him he is needed to identify the suspect.

It helps that not only is the plot tighter than in the first novel, but Dax is a stronger, better developed character. He has learned from his involvement with spies, and is now more suspicious of what is going on around him, and more able to act decisively when needed. In Berlin he is able to prevent an assassination attempt on the president, but he suspects Sartorius has something to do with it. He passes these suspicions on, but they are not acted upon before Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas in a scenario that echoes the plot foiled in Berlin.

The Predicament is still second rank Boyd, I think (and I’m pretty sure tat the stage is set for a third novel), but it holds together better than its predecessor, and engages the reader (or at least, this reader) better. I probably won’t have the same hesitation when it comes to buying the next novel.