When I was in college in the mid-1980s, I discovered the Brazos Bookstore. It became my favorite place to shop for books. (Astonishingly, it is still in business.) While browsing one day, I noticed that there were books by an author named William Boyd. I was struck by that because that is nearly my name: I am Robert William Boyd. I was curious about my near name twin—was he a good writer? I thought about picking up one of his books, but I decided not to because buying a book because the author has a very similar name to your own seems like a trivial, unworthy reason to buy a book. But I now knew of the existence of “William Boyd.” That fact lodged itself in my brain.
A couple of years later, I moved to Seattle, Washington, which in the late 80s and 90s was a booklover’s paradise. It was full of new and used bookstores of very high quality, wonderful for the browser. One day, in one of those second-hand shops, I stumbled across another William Boyd book, School Ties. It was a collection of two television plays Boyd had written about English public school life, Dutch Girls and Good and Bad at Games. Because it was a second-hand copy, it was very cheap. My objection to buying a copy of a book because the author shared my name was outweighed by the low price of the book. I bought it and was vastly entertained. It started a lifelong habit of reading and liking books by William Boyd.
Boyd’s first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981, the year I graduated from high school. Boyd himself is 11 years older than I am. A Good Man in Africa was an incredibly funny book. It is set in a fictional African nation that is unmistakably Nigeria. Boyd himself was born in Ghana and spent a portion of his childhood in Nigeria, before being shipped off to boarding school in Scotland. Having worked in Nigeria, I felt a loose connection.
While I enjoyed all those early William Boyd novels, the one that knocked me over was The New Confessions (1987). The basic outline is that John James Todd is born in Scotland, attends a boarding school (of course), ends up in the British army during World War I, while there becomes a filmmaker for the Army, recording propaganda films but also shooting film that shows the absolute horror of trench life, is captured by the Germans, makes friends with a gay prison guard, Karl-Heinz Kornfeld (who seems to be modeled on Peter Lorre), starts a postwar career as a commercial filmmaker, ends up working in Germany and making technically advanced and artistically significant films (that will remind readers of the films of Abel Gance) based on the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As the Weimar Republic falls to the Nazis, Todd and Kornfeld make their way to Hollywood, where Todd gains a career making westerns. After the war, he is caught up in the anticommunist hysteria, and spends several years making movies in Mexico. In the end, he is a mostly forgotten man living a paranoid life in a villa on a Spanish Island where his oeuvre is about to be rediscovered. The New Confessions is funny and moving. In a sense, Boyd creates a history of film in which an Englishman is one of the artistic geniuses from the earliest days, his life combining elements of Abel Gance, Luis Buñuel, and other filmmakers. As a film buff, I was enchanted by it. And the peripatetic adventures of Todd, careening from one event to another, brushing against the great personages of the day, for his entire life, form a model for many of Boyd’s subsequent books. One could call them picaresque bildungsroman novels but combining this with the actual history of actual people is Boyd’s specialty. The genre almost deserves a new name, all its own; I will leave that to future scholars to coin.
Boyd has returned to this basic story over and over. About a decade after writing The New Confessions, Boyd created a fictional biography of an American artist, Nat Tate. Tate was an American Abstract Expressionist, and the novel was published with the connivance of Modern Painters magazine, and initially was passed off as the true story of a hitherto undiscovered painter. Such a scenario is plausible—art historians are constantly digging up artists who for various reasons were ignored and forgotten, but who in hindsight seem quite exciting.
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002) is sort of a spin-off from the Nat Tate hoax. Like Boyd himself, Mountstuart is born far from England—in Montevideo, Uruguay, in fact. Having spent a little time in Montevideo, I feel like it would have been a lovely place to be a child. Mountstuart is educated at Oxford, writes a critical biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley and a brisk-selling sexy novel called The Girl Factory. Mountstuart joins naval intelligence, recruited by Ian Fleming, and is assigned to watch over the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who was thought to perhaps be a Nazi sympathizer. He ends up interned in Switzerland, becomes a gallery director in New York just in time for the explosion of Abstract Expressionism, where he encounters Nat Tate and other real figures from the artistic milieu of the time, he swerves wildly to Nigeria, where he witnesses the Biafran civil war, back in London becomes tangentially involved with a splinter cell of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, then retires to a comfortable life in rural France.
We can see a pattern emerging in Boyd’s novels. He has a desire to write histories of an entire century through the biographies of wandering protagonists. As someone deeply involved with art history, this appeals to me. And without having nearly the level of dislocation and meanderings that Boyd’s heroes have had, I feel similar to them. I was born overseas, have lived in multiple countries, having glancing acquaintances with impressive artistic figures of my time—one can see why this genre of Boydian picaresque resonates with me.
One day recently, Boyd posted on Facebook that Waterstones, the British bookseller, was selling signed copies of his new novel, The Romantic. Even though I have been reading Boyd’s books for decades, I didn’t have a signed copy of any of them; I instantly ordered myself a copy.
It was a new exemplar of his favorite genre, set this time in the 19th century. Cashel Greville Ross is born in Ireland, raised there until circumstances force him to move to Oxford, whence he joins the army as a teenager, becoming a drummer boy. The function of drummer boys was unknown to me until I read this book—they were important in relaying information from commander to foot soldiers. Ross ends up grievously wounded at the battle of Waterloo, which gives him a certain cache for the rest of his life. He joins the East India Company as a soldier, lives in Italy for a while, befriending both Shelley and Lord Byron, has affairs, ends up in debtor’s prison, immigrates to the young USA, becomes a farmer in Massachusetts, flees to England, mounts an expedition to find the source of the Nile, ends up an a consul for the nation of Nicaragua in Trieste, becomes an acquaintance of Richard Francis Burton, and dies while traveling in Germany. He gets to witness the first rail travel and electric lights, writes two books (including a saucy tale of illicit romance that sells very well), and as in Boyd’s other books of this genre, meets with exceptional historical figures.
I found it very enjoyable, although I thought Ross’s motives for moving to America and taking on the African expedition stretched credibility. But Boyd clearly wanted to write about those things and therefore contrived ways to put his hero in those situations. And once Ross has made those journeys to America and to Africa, the stories of his adventures there are compelling.
And that’s the point. Boyd inserts his heroes into places where world history is happening to witness and take part in the history without really changing it. Considering the gaps we have in history, it is entirely plausible that for any given event, someone was there just outside of view of those who later recorded history. Indeed, the further back one goes, the more such lacunae exist. Setting his books in the 19th and 20th centuries makes them relatable. There is ample literature and history written about those periods by persons who lived in them, but still enough space for Boyd to slide his heroes into the history.
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