There was part of me as I read through Alistair Owen’s extensive interviews with William Boyd that wondered whether the whole thing might not be a characteristically elaborate Boydian joke. It was Boyd of course who, along with Gore Vidal and David Bowie, constructed the character of Nat Tate, a hoax abstract expressionist, about whom he wrote a fine (and entirely fictional) biography. It turns out that Owen does exist; indeed, he’s already produced a similar book of interviews with the film-maker Bruce Robinson. Owen is a big Boyd fan: such a fan, in fact, that he often seems to know Boyd’s work better than the man himself, helpfully reminding the author of plotlines and characters’ names, making sure that Boyd knows that he’s watched even the deleted scenes on the DVD of the TV adaptation of Any Human Heart. The questions are doozies – Owen is no Jeremy Paxman and never misses a chance to lob a compliment in with his prompts. It makes for a fascinating read, as one seeks to get to the bottom of the dynamic between the older, wildly successful novelist and his simpering interrogator – younger, an aspirant novelist himself and clearly slightly smitten by Boyd.
A few pages in, I was feeling bad-tempered about the whole project. Such is Owen’s regard for his subject that he doesn’t feel able to separate the author’s statements into paragraphs, meaning that several of the longer answers spool over several dense pages. I’m a huge Boyd fan – I’ve read every novel he’s written and loved most of them – but even my heart sank slightly when Owen, after stating apologetically that he has not been able to cover the whole of Boyd’s journalistic output, or his unproduced screenplays, in the interviews, announces proudly that he and Boyd did, however, “talk about 17 novels, five collections of short stories, 12 films, five television series and three stage plays” during their 33 hours of interviews conducted over Zoom during lockdown. The book was initially meant to come out to celebrate Boyd’s 70th birthday in 2022, but Covid-19 stalled things and so here we have it, hot on the heels of Boyd’s superb (it’s clearly catching) 17th novel, The Romantic.
The book is structured chronologically, moving between Boyd’s novels and short stories and his film and TV work. We read about the tentative, unpublished novels, then the huge success of his first, A Good Man in Africa, and near-simultaneous story collection, On the Yankee Station, in 1981. It’s easy to think of Boyd’s career as leaping from one triumph to the next: he followed up his debut novel with hit after hit, including An Ice Cream War and Brazzaville Beach, his books were optioned and turned into films, he was shortlisted for the Booker, he won a host of other prizes, was selected as one of Granta’s 20 under 40. But what Owen does, perhaps by the special combination of enthusiasm and his encyclopedic knowledge of Boyd’s work, is to open up the spaces in between, showing us the struggle of the process and the failures that still weigh heavily, particularly when it comes to Boyd’s time in the film industry.
It may also be that because Owen is a writer himself, this makes The Mirror and the Road fascinating when it comes to craft. It is full of advice for anyone who writes, from the relatively commonplace – “nothing is ever lost”; you need to “make fiction so real that your readers began to forget it was fiction”; “if you want to make a political point, write a manifesto, not a novel” – to the illuminating: “you often get as close to whatever the truth may be by inventing the truth as you imagine it, rather than by going out with a camera and notebook and trying to record it and write it down”. Owen is excellent too at getting Boyd to speak about his “whole-life” novels, the way they move through narrative time, the deep research and planning involved in plotting and drafting them.
In the end, the book is – somewhat surprisingly – a huge success, showing Boyd as a warm, generous and thoughtful man, and shining a light on a body of work that, despite all the plaudits and prizes, feels as if it doesn’t get quite the recognition it deserves. It sent me back to some of the early novels that I hadn’t read for years, then to those mid-period masterpieces, Any Human Heart and Restless. This is a strange work of hagiography, but I loved it.
• The Mirror and the Road: Conversations With William Boyd by Alistair Owen is published by Penguin (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
