Interesting or dull, friendly or hateful, they escape their own clichés and histories rather well. These characters may be great historical figures, but they are - as in other Boyd books - merely people his own characters encounter. In this case, these little curlicues are entertaining rather than self-aggrandising. We have a litany of historical characters and settings - Byron and the Shelleys, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, the battle of Waterloo these are things that in the hands of another novelist would seem both very brave and also very cheap to bring in. We have one or two references to the Russian novelists Boyd so admires (in this case, a photograph of Turgenev - although the work of Chekov appears in Any Human Heart and a plot from Pushkin is happily lifted for Love Is Blind ). In this book we also get more Boyd obsessions - numerous lovers, a few friends, broken families - but also more cultural artefacts. Writing, soldiering, farming, exploring - it’s all here.Īnd as these books tend to, the story of Cashel Greville Ross, crosses almost the entire world and almost the entire nineteenth century.įrom Ireland to Oxford, into and through Old Europe, from Sri Lanka to Boston, from Zanzibar to the very source of the Nile. An almost Dickensian array of material circumstances: from a serving-woman’s son in rural Ireland to bungalows in the Raj before the Mutiny, to authorial wealth in London, to a debtors’ prison and more. Like Boyd’s other books, it’s about a man whose life contains a lot of incident: love and loss, dizzying success and bitter failure. It purports to be the author Boyd’s attempt to reconstruct a life from fragmentary evidence, claiming that - in the absence of proof - the protagonist’s story becomes more real as it is fictionalised. This book is different - instead, it’s a work of pseudo-history. Both of the above are essentially autobiographies - Any Human Heart more of an edited diary, The New Confessions a self-conscious memoir modelled on Rousseau. This is another in the line of The New Confessions and Any Human Heart - both stories of an entire, and full, life. Naturally, I started the book as soon as it arrived and had read it in as close to one sitting as its length allowed. There’s an audible click, and then it’s happened! The plot has executed a perfect lurching turn. Others are almost stock-in-trade, but they are executed so well they thrilled this reader - not just because they were exciting, but because they were executed with such pitch perfection. I can only say that they are.Ĭertain twists of this narrative are visible far in advance - but that does not diminish their pleasure. It’s impossible for me to explain fully why his technique works so well - why many of his books are so satisfying. And some of the technical side eludes me, too.
Why that particular form, almost Victorian, attracts him so much. It’s beyond me to say why William Boyd is attracted to the long, cradle-to-grave novels.
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