READING a William Boyd book is like devouring a Willard Price adventure for adults. Willard who? Bear with me: this is high praise. Price (1887-1983) was a writer of a series of popular novels for children featuring two brothers working with their zoologist father. Beginning in 1949 with Amazon Adventure, the sequence ends with Arctic Adventure in 1980. I missed the latter; the last I read was 1972’s grimly titled Cannibal Adventure, then glam rock happened.
Price wanted to make reading exciting for children and he did with serious aplomb. The same can be said for Boyd (for adults) whose own stories – as with this new novel The Romantic – have the addictive insistence of Haribo sweeties.
Boyd is a popular writer because he can write, he can tell a good yarn. The Romantic is another of his fake biographies. Set in the 19th century, it is the life of one Cashel Greville Ross and moves in locale from Ireland to the battle of Waterloo, from Sri Lanka to New England. Ross encounters the Italy of Byron and Shelley, then moves on to the Africa of Speke and Burton.
It is essentially a sequence of shaggy dog stories, a kennel of increasingly hirsute tales. Ever since his debut, A Good Man In Africa (1981) Boyd has majored in embarrassment and The Romantic is no exception: the humiliations that afflict Ross are myriad and darkly hilarious. There’s something of Gregor MacGregor (the bonkers real-life Scottish adventurer) in Boyd’s Celtic picaresque.
Boyd deep dives when he researches. Writing Waiting for Sunrise (2012) he apparently read more than 100 books on Vienna; I’m guessing another thousand informed The Romantic. He gives his characters obsessions: Lorimer Black in Armadillo (1998) collects antique helmets; John James Todd in The New Confessions (1987) wants to film a nine-hour picture about Rousseau; Hope Clearwater studies chimpanzees in Brazzaville Beach (1990). Here we get Ross’s experiments in beer manufacture and his search for the source of the Nile. Boyd knows Africa so he’s deft at capturing the textures of the bush, both its beauty and its ever-present threat of fatal disease. He’s good on war too, here capturing the carnage at Waterloo.
Boyd makes sure that his characters are never quite certain who or what they are: his master is Nabokov. He likes masks, multiple selves: Ross is forever trying on new outfits, uniforms. Boyd likes taking a Nabokovian whip to his characters; he puts them through the mill. Here the innocent are duped, adulterers never stop cheating, thieves keep a-thieving. His is a world of dangerous absurdities. Lies and deception are everywhere.
The author is fascinated by failure, by those, like Ross, who never quite make it, or are forgotten; Boyd is haunted by the reputational fate of Cyril Connolly. There’s a palpable worry that history might treat him the same way. Boyd’s fellow Scot, William McIlvanney, had similar fears.
He is particularly good at names. His do not have the daffy loopiness we associate with Thomas Pynchon or the grotesquerie of Dickens. Boyd has a particular taste for using Scottish surnames as forenames as with Lorimer Black in Armadillo (1998) or Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart (2002) In The Romantic we hear of a Findlay Greville, a Gilchrist-Baird, and an Atkins Hamerton.
Some critics don’t like the ease of Boyd’s facility. Adam Mars-Jones once snobbishly harrumphed the novelist “is neither an intellectual nor a stylist”. James Wood rudely said Boyd’s work has the same relation to literary fiction as “a wave has to a handshake; it is eager to get away”. Wood wants literature to grab us, to pull our arms out our sockets like a Trump greeting; he wants art that looks like “art”. But who wants a sweaty, overworked, Finnegans Wake these days? Boyd will never win the Nobel because his books are, on the whole, enjoyable; he’s essentially a comic novelist.
Talking of his own father’s death Boyd has said it “imbued him with an awareness of the precarious state of existence”. He goes on: ‘What early bereavement does is tell you that your present happiness, whatever it may be, is incredibly fragile, and it takes very little for that to be shattered irrevocably. And I think if you realise that, you go through life with a totally different point of view.’ That is the essential message running through this great fake biography he calls The Romantic.
