Love is Blind

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Boyd has been with his wife Susan since they met as students at Glasgow University and all his books are dedicated to her. They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet). Boyd, a self-confessed “Chekhov obsessive”, doesn’t tell us that Chekhov, like Brodie, had a passionate relationship with a blondwould-be opera singer whose name happened to be Lika. The son of a popular, fundamentalist minister he is the first of his large family to move away from the family manse and pursue his career in nearby Edinburgh.

And the plot itself, while a reasonable page turner, was a little overwrought and contrived for my literary taste. Brodie] does leave, this time forever, a fugitive of sorts covering his tracks in various European cities before alighting—the novel’s only stumble—in Trieste, where things become briefly silly. Heart wrenching, sentimental and moving, William Boyd’s 2018 release presents a tragic portrait of the challenges of love. In Any Human Heart and The New Confessions so rich is his mix of fact and fiction that he almost convinced me he was writing about the life of a real people. It’s a gently humorous moment, as if Boyd is drawing our attention to the tricks of his narrative trade – to his renowned storytelling knack of keeping us turning the pages to see what happens next.He and his wife have a house in Chelsea, West London but spend most of the year at their chateau in Bergerac in south west France, where Boyd produces award-winning wines. After 14 novels and many literary prizes, Boyd’s storytelling abilities are beyond dispute and are clearly on display in this latest tale that follows its hero, Brodie Moncur, on a restless journey from Scotland to Europe and beyond as the 19th century shades into the 20th . Boyd brilliantly brings the whole thing to life with his rich descriptions of time and place and razor sharp dialogue. There are a few more further twists before this book reaches it's tragic conclusion which was unbearably sad.

Again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the past catches up to them, and in their moment of panic, Lika leaves Brodie for another man. But look again at that date, and you can almost – almost – feel sorry for the people who were hoaxed. Even though he’s wearing his glasses, she’s standing “at the very limits of both the lenses in his Franklin spectacles”, as if he can’t quite get a purchase on who she is; as if she is, somehow, unknowable. Chekhov, though unnamed, appears in only half a dozen pages of Love is Blind, yet his spirit hovers over nearly all of it.First, at one key point, Brodie's tyrannical father, Malky Moncur, a famously impassioned, if rather hypocritical, preacher, bases a sermon on an Apocryphal text to indirectly condemn his son: but the verses quoted bear no resemblance to any version of Baruch 6 I have seen (did Malky simply invent them? His six-hour Cold War spy thriller, Spy City (Miramax, ZDF) was broadcast and streaed internationally at the end of 2020. The fact that Moncur is, like Chekhov, a consumptive, is an obvious link, but there are many others, from a plot which can be seen as amplifying the closing lines of Chekhov’s short story ‘The Lady and the Dog’ to a number of other details drawn from Chekhov’s own life. Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away.

Pleasingly he’s not too good looking or too hideous – his great height (I’m thinking 6 foot 4 inches or thereabouts), his very dark, swarthy looks and severe short sightedness are easily envisaged. Then, after a hundred or so pages of nothing, the book just ended, and while I suppose the ending made sense, and made up a little for what had gone before, it was incredibly anticlimactic and failed to provide nearly the same emotional punch as many of Boyd's other works.In this cross-country tale, William Boyd’s historical composition considers the life and times of a Scottish piano tuner, who finds his existence upended by his extreme love for a married Russian singer. None other than William Boyd, writing a piece in The Guardian on the centenary of Chekhov’s death in 2004. No matter how implausibly exotic – Hemingway, the Duchess of Windsor – he placed them into the story as carefully as an expert fly fisherman, making sure there are no unnatural ripples on the surface.