PITCH PERFECT William Boyd’s ode to the rollercoaster of life and love
intertwines with the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life – with appearances by Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ian Fleming, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, to name just some of the book’s real-life characters. Boyd’s self-avowed ambition is “to make fiction seem so real you forget it’s fiction.” This is certainly the case with his 1998 novel, illustrated with purported photographs of an artist called Nat Tate and his works. On publication in New York, the novel caused consternation as the art establishment scrambled to identify the unknown artist, before it transpired that Boyd had invented a “forgotten” American artist, sourced the anonymous photographs from second-hand shops, and painted the “pictures” himself. He’s no mean artist, since one of “Nat’s” paintings actually sold at Sotheby’s in 2011, an event that Boyd describes as rather surreal. Photographs from Boyd’s personal collection are also a key element of Sweet Caress. As the author comments, “The most banal photograph can be gravid with emotion and, similarly, something in a novel can reveal an aspect of our human lives that historians or journalists or reporters can’t.” Sweet Caress recounts the life of professional photographer Amory Clay, who moves from 1920s London to fashion shoots in New York, and then war reportage in Normandy and, later, Vietnam. When asked if he is a photographer, Boyd says: “I’m technically inept. That’s the novelist’s sleight of hand. If you acquire an issue of Amateur Photographer from 1925 you’ve got a mass of information.” Sleight of hand is one way of describing it, but Boyd’s skill lies in prolonged and meticulous planning which allows him to weave the right details into his narrative, usually working backwards from the end.
“The whole-life novel is a small genre with very eclectic exemplars.” William Boyd, a multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, has made it something of a trademark, having now written five. They include: The New Confessions (Hamish Hamilton UK, 1987 / William Morrow US, 1988), Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960 (Bloomsbury, 1998), Any Human Heart (Penguin Random House UK, 2002 / Knopf US, 2003), Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury, 2015), and most recently, Love is Blind: The Rapture of Brodie Moncur (Viking UK / Alfred A. Knopf US, 2018). “It’s the haphazard rollercoaster of a life that is key in the whole-life novel rather than a particular plot, theme or central relationship.”1 Almost inevitably, though, the lives are also coloured and influenced by the historical events they witness. The events and the places are true, but clearly, the fact that the protagonists are purely imaginary sets them apart from another genre, much in vogue, the biographical novel. Place is essential to all of Boyd’s work. In Any Human Heart, Boyd uses Logan Mountstuart’s journals to trace the arc of his peripatetic life – from his youth in Montevideo, Uruguay, to Oxford, Paris, the Spanish Civil War, and ultimately New York, until he moves to West Africa, then London and finally to his old age in France. Exhausting, you might think, but the pace of this fictional autobiography is so carefully gauged that the result is a page-turner, and its hero’s life
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FEATURES | ISSUE 86, November 2018
As well as introducing real people and real historical events to give the fictional life more authenticity – and interest – Boyd’s novels are also all love stories. In answer to my question regarding the patterns of his protagonists’ lives, Boyd continues, “I happen to think that every human being on the planet is searching for love. It gives our lifeadventure a meaning, a significance – if we can find it. It’s a profound universal need. But life is all about good luck and bad luck, as well. The roll of the fatidic dice determines everything.” This chimes with Logan Mountstuart’s thoughts in Any Human Heart, where he contemplates his good luck in meeting Freya Deverell, whom he marries: “That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience… We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says” (p.458). In Boyd’s latest novel, Love is Blind, it was Brodie Moncur’s good luck to meet the one woman he loves, the Russian singer Lika Blum – his bad luck to contract tuberculosis. There are no doubt resonances between Brodie Moncur, Logan Mountstuart and – in female form – Amory Clay, protagonists whose lives are constantly being hijacked by chance encounters and events. Returning to the “whole-life” genre preferred by Boyd, it is, he tells me, “particularly suited in trying to come to grips with the complexities of human condition. Everyone seems to be able to relate to it.” Brodie Moncur, the protagonist of Love is Blind, is a son of the manse, and his first job is with a renowned piano manufacturer in Edinburgh. When I ask him whether the name is significant, Boyd replies, “I simply wanted a good Scottish-sounding name. The same applies to the family. I knew that Brodie would come from a big family and that
