Should I like the Novels of William Boyd? Would He Want Me to?

What are we to make of William Boyd? Unlike several of the novelists of his generation, he has never become political  or joined the world of celebrity. Yet he has quietly persuaded a lot of people to buy his books. I buy them myself, though it took me a while to get round to it. I hadn’t liked an Evelyn Waugh TV adaptation he did, and I had somehow given myself the impression that he was a standard-issue left-winger just like the others.  Actually, I have little idea of his politics, and I wonder if he does, though I am fairly sure that he doesn’t share my religious opinions. His most recent book ‘Before Sunrise’ disappointed me, but he will be getting a lot of publicity this autumn when his attempt at a James Bond book ‘Solo’ is to be published. I am sure it will be better than Sebastian Faulks’s recent effort.

 

Why?

 

Well, Boyd is just more interesting than Faulks, who doesn’t (in my experience) stand up to much re-reading. I recently gave up an attempt to re-read ‘Birdsong’, itself stimulated by the usual bad TV adaptation. By contrast, I’m now doing a complete re-read of all the Boyd books I’ve read over the past five years or so (it’s always interesting finding the abandoned airline boarding passes or low-value foreign banknotes  from half-forgotten journeys which I used as bookmarks, so telling me exactly when I last read the book concerned, often longer ago than I thought). He also once engaged in an enjoyable tease of the modern art world. which has to be good.

 

Two things keep me reading. The first is the clear but intelligent prose, never lazy, suggesting a lot of hard, thoughtful  writing and avoiding of clichés (Hemingway’s old claim that ‘It reads easy because it was writ hard’ should be on any writer’s mind). The other is a straightforward gift as a story-teller, coupled with a genius for evoking time and place.

 

Sometimes (this put me off ‘Before Sunrise’ and occasionally irritates me in other books) the minor historical facts seem to me to be poorly-researched or just mistaken, which is particularly shocking when everything else is of such a high standard. I can’t offhand think of anything more serious than the way his characters seem to leave from or arrive in London by the wrong terminus, as they do a bit in in ‘Any Human Heart’  and arrive in or depart from Berlin by the wrong station( as I suspect they do in ‘The New Confessions’), as well as one or two mistakes about Oxford geography (Bardwell *Lane*? Was it ever called that? ). And I find it hard to believe that a Belgian news-agency, in 1939, would send out its stories by Morse code, as described in ‘Restless’. I’m also a little puzzled as to why an obvious account of the very odd Venlo incident ( in which the Germans kidnapped two senior SIS officers on the Dutch border in 1939) needs to be described as taking place in ‘Prenslo’. Either make up your own incident, or put your characters into an acknowledged historical event, I should have thought.  But who except me would care anyway?

 

And what does it matter with such an imagination at work? His recent ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ successfully and believably did something I’d long wanted to do in my own long-projected and hopelessly stalled attempt at a thriller. A character manages to disappear entirely off the map of identity, credit cards, telephone, passport,  and obtains a new and trouble-free official personality thanks to a hilariously macabre death and the believably easy disposal of the resulting corpse. I envied this passage a lot. Much of this takes place in a marvellously-evoked London underworld of horrible crooks.

 

But this is nothing compared to his plots. These describe believable if unusual lives, of people not wholly unlike us, which take them into places most of us would avoid, and into quarrels, commitments, obligations and  dangers which we would likewise do our best to stay out of.  Here we find out how it might have been had we not been so cautious, emollient and ready to compromise as most of us are, most of the time.  The outcome is often unpleasant, leading to personal grief, ostracism, imprisonment, violence and loneliness, not to mention abject poverty and squalor. One character descends by a series of unimaginable downward lurches, from fashionable authorship to living on tins of dogfood in a bare basement.  But of course it also contains its rewards and satisfactions, the pleasant warmth of unviolated integrity, the satisfaction of pure artistic achievement. It’s a  remarkable broad world, which introduces us to Picasso in pre-1939 Paris, places us in Weimar Berlin and McCarthy-era Hollywood,  and in intimate contact with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their exile in the Bahamas. On re-reading , I can’t help noticing that two of his characters turn into dirty old men who watch women through binoculars, that there is an amazing amount of self-abuse in some of his books,  and that (again) two (perhaps three, I need to check)  characters have to leave the USA in a hurry, one because he has been cohabiting with an under-age girl, and one because a Japanese detective (called O’Hara) has misunderstood his instructions and murdered somebody on his behalf. Two of his characters end up in mysterious prisons in the middle of wars.

 

He evokes Africa beautifully, its comedy, its ludicrously misplaced optimism, its beauty and its sudden danger  (and you might say that he should, because he grew up there, but a lot of people who grew up there couldn’t evoke anything). In two of his books (‘Brazzaville Beach’ and ‘Restless’) his central character(written in the first person) is a woman. In both cases their femaleness seems believable to me, but I cannot say if women feel the same way.

 

But what is the purpose of all this writing? Why does it make me so sad?  I suppose it is because it is so good and so absorbing, yet so bleak.  It seems clear to me that Boyd believes that we are just tossed about on the waves of circumstance, that there is no  design or purpose to the cosmos and that therefore our choices are even more terrifyingly unpredictable than we think. I must add here that his description of violence among Chimpanzees, while they are being studied by Western scientists who believe them to be peaceful, is one of the most disturbing and engrossing passages of fiction I have ever read.

 

From time to time he lets slip the fact that he is obviously interested in, but baffled by the wonders of higher mathematics and physics, turbulence and climatology (one of his characters is driven mad by these immense puzzles, though he is also depicted as taking psychiatric medication. Was this episode drawn from some real experience? Sorry to drag in a concern of mine, but I’d be inclined to suspect the pills ,rather than the genius) .

 

What would I recommend? I daren’t. Perhaps begin, as many did, with ‘Restless’, and see if you like what you find. Nobody likes everything, and I can’t expect people to share my own tastes, but Boyd’s prose gives at least as much pleasure as the first taste of a freezing cold beer, consumed at dusk on a tropical terrace, at the end of a long hard day.