Love Is Blind, William Boyd

While more restricted in its scale than usual, Love Is Blind sits on the fictional biography shelf of Boyd's canon, taking in much of a single character's life, rather than a more focused, eventful interlude.

This time, it's the life of professional piano tuner, Brodie Moncur, who we first encounter in late 19th century Edinburgh. Charged with helping expand a piano selling business, he's sent to Paris, setting in motion a lifetime on the move, and entwining his path with that of opera singer, Lydia Blum. But Lydia's life is already bound to that of a brilliant, flawed Irish musician, John Kilbarron, forcing Brodie into years of compromise and subterfuge.

An outline of this novel does no justice to the detail Boyd that invests into Brodie's life and times. Whether it's the careful description of how he plies his trade, efficient travelogue on the countries and cities he lives in, or observations on societal change as the pace of life accelerates into the 20th century, Boyd's writing absorbs you into Brodie's world. For one, early on I doubted how interested I could be in the art of piano tuning, but it wasn't long before it became fascinating. I was reminded in this of a similar transformation in Roth's American Pastoral, where glove manufacture is similarly compellingly described.

If it lacks at all, it's only because the focus on characters is narrower, and it's shorter in historical scope than his other biographical works, where wars and larger mass movements come into view. But, as Boyd always is, it's still a very enjoyable and easy read. That's not a criticism, it's testament to his skill at so deftly writing an inviting other world.

Summary: it's been too long Mr Boyd - write faster!

Any Human Heart

Although it was on television a quite few months ago now, we've only just gotten around to watching the Channel 4 adaptation of William Boyd's 2002 novel Any Human Heart. While the novel was displaced from my top ten by Boyd's earlier (and more biologist-friendly) novel Brazzaville Beach, it really shouldn't have been. While not without it's flaws, the novel is a wonderfully told, enjoyable, humane and, at times, sad journey through the event-filled decades of the 20th century, as filtered through the shifting perspective of far-from-everyman Logan Mountstuart.

Anyway, the television adaptation, while also enjoyable and perfectly acceptable, provides a great illustration of the difference between what works in literature and what works on the screen. Particularly so since the novel was adapted by no less than Boyd himself, and it's hard to imagine a more considerate treatment to its pages. Further, it's also been allowed the luxury of spreading out across more than four and a half hours (= six hours subtract adverts).

The most obvious departure is that the novel's narrative structure, essentially a long succession of diary entries written by the steadily changing character of Mountstuart across the span of his life, evaporates into merely a long chain of events. Inevitable really, given the translation to a visual medium, but in doing so Mountstuart becomes less a fleshed-out character and more an alternative Zelig, with walk-on parts throughout 20th century history. Oddly, I'd argue that it still works, but more as a separate dramatic work than an adaptation.

Another departure is that, even with its extended runtime, the television series is forced to significantly abridge the novel. This has left quite a few interesting portions on the cutting room floor, but even then the portions that survive are heavily abbreviated. Not so much, or so significantly, in plot, but more in character. Mountstuart's friends, lovers and rivals, all living, breathing characters in the novel, are reduced here to brief appearances that lose much of what made the novel significant (at least to me). Almost to the extent that the critical departures of Mountstuart's second wife, Freya, and of his son, Lionel, lose almost all of their impact. Boyd does what he can to make these losses appear powerful on-screen, but there's only so much that he can do.

Anyway, as someone used to disappointment in the translation of favoured works to the screen, this is very far from disappointing. I think that Boyd has done as good a job as he could, but has wound up with something quite different to his original literary effort. It's certainly engaging enough that I'll bet it turns many people onto the novel, and that's no bad thing. In fact, should I ever diminish the vast stack of birthday/Christmas tomes, I might be one of them.

Return of an old favourite

One of the problems with favourite novelists is that they never write books often enough. I've complained here before about Iain Banks, John Varley and Barbara Kingsolver (the latter of whom has only recently produced a novel after a 9 year gap!). But another writer who's been missing-in-action for some time, and who even appeared in my top ten list, is the British novelist William Boyd. To be fair, his last novel, Restless, wasn't anywhere near so dim-and-distant as Kingsolver's, but he could definitely do with putting pen to paper a little more often.

Ordinary Thunderstorms follows Adam Kindred, an ex-patriot climatologist returning to London in search of a job, and licking the self-inflicted wounds that ended his marriage in the US. Enjoying a celebratory meal after a promising interview at Imperial, he meets a fellow scientist, medical researcher Philip Wang. After Wang mistakenly leaves his briefcase in the restaurant, Kindred tries to return it, only to find the other man dying from a mortal stab wound. Panicking, Kindred flees the scene, but not before encountering, and assaulting, the shadowy figure of Wang's murderer. After sleeping rough for a night, Kindred attempts to report the crime to the police, but baulks when he finds that he himself is sought for the murder. Mindful of the incriminating circumstances he finds himself in, and fearful of the hitman sent after Wang, Kindred makes a fateful decision: to disappear into the ranks of London's homeless, and to cut all the ties with his previous life. His journey into the poverty-stricken underbelly of the city brings him into contact with a range of memorable characters and a slice of society he has never experienced before, and his continual shedding of the trappings of his previous existence sees him take on a succession of new identities. But, much as Kindred has suspected, powerful vested interests are still seeking him, and they are not averse at all at using force against the underclass he finds himself adrift among.

An interesting read this one. On one level, Ordinary Thunderstorms is a very successful and readable thriller-cum-social-commentary. Boyd leads the reader on a rich journey through London's overlooked underclass, and does so within the frame of an engagingly twisty plot. But on the other hand, the core decision of Kindred to evade both the police and Wang's murderer is one that's not entirely easy to swallow, but it's crucial to the subsequent twists and pivots of the plot. Boyd tries hard to make it seem a credible choice, but possibly because Kindred is still a "new" character to the reader, it rings a false note. As such, if one finds Kindred's choice completely understandable given the circumstances, then the novel is an entirely enjoyable romp, but if one judges this decision too implausible, and I almost did, the novel may feel a little contrived.

All that said, there's still a lot to like here. As usual, Boyd is great at conjuring up characters, settings and situations, and his prose is as engaging as ever. I particularly liked the attention that he lavished on the character of Ingram, the director of the pharmaceutical company that Wang works for. Though somewhat peripheral to the action of the novel, Boyd invests him with some wry oversights, and gives him a touching relationship with his gay son. Even the hitman character, Jonjo, is fleshed out into a more complete person than his role in the novel might otherwise have received. And Boyd doesn't let the plot follow an entirely predictable course. There are a few unexpected changes in direction along the way, including something of a realistic deflation of the action at the end. Were this a Hollywood production, Kindred would have some sort of climactic confrontation with an evil, moustache-twirling corporate monster, but here the pharmaceutical conspiracy unwinds in a modern fuzz of PR spin.

Since both Kindred and I are scientists, I can't help but comment on one niggling aspect of the plot. In spite of being in possession of Wang's research notes, and realising that Wang's murder may be related to his work, Kindred is extremely slow to go through these notes and piece together a motive for this crime. While this could be put down to Kindred's specialism as a climatologist and his unfamiliarity with medical research, Wang's findings of extra deaths among the test subjects taking the drug that he's working on are hardly esoteric results that only a trained eye could spot. In fact, anyone living in the west at any point in the last 50 years would, faced with the same facts as Kindred, readily join the dots, not least because they would be attuned to the "medical conspiracy" narrative that prevails in popular culture. However, after an initial skim-read that establishes the notes as medical science, Kindred instead takes his time in putting two and two together. If the notes contained opaque findings concerning chemical metabolism then things might be a little more plausible, but I found Kindred's late investigation into Wang's research more in the service of novel length than in the creation of a believable scientist character.

Overall, I must admit to being a little disappointed here. Usually Boyd is an entirely safe pair of hands, readily capable of novels that work in terms of character, plotting and verisimilitude (his Any Human Heart being a particular stand-out work). But here his plotting has slight but significant flaws, with the result that his solid work in character and scene-setting is short-changed. Of course, if Ordinary Thunderstorms were written by a lesser novelist, I might overlook the brief periods where my credulity was overstretched, but I've admired and enjoyed so many of Boyd's past novels that the bar is set pretty high. Still, whether one is a fan of Boyd or not, it still contains sufficient pleasures to justify picking up.

Top Ten Books

C was telling me yesterday about a feature that appears in her work newsletter in which senior management figures list their top ten books and describe why they like them. Avid reader that she is, she's already got a top ten and was thinking about whether to submit her books to the newsletter for universal acclaim/derision.

Not to be outdone, I had a think about what I would pick. It was quite a bit of a think since I tend to forget even great books (at least from my working memory). Anyway, in purely chronological order (ranking is dangerous), and strictly for today (might be different tomorrow), my top ten would be ...

The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke, 1956
A bad sign: starting with science fiction. Still, this is definitely a classic of the so-called "golden age" of the genre. It sports robots, aliens, a disembodied and benevolent AI, a deep mystery, a journey between the stars and tantalising glimpses of Grander Things. Marvellous.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, 1973
A very difficult book to describe, and not one that would sound that appealing from a plot summary. A salesman gradually becomes insane, believes the writings of a hack science fiction writer are factual, and runs amok at a literary convention. But Vonnegut's writing (and drawings!) is melancholically brilliant and surprisingly humane. And he carries off introducing himself as a character fantastically.

Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks, 1990
One word here: structure. While set within the science fiction utopia of the Culture, this novel uses an impressive jumbled narrative to both take its central character on a journey to seek redemption, while delving into the reasons why this is required. The handling of its revelations is brilliant, being melded perfectly into the narrative. Not the most "world-building" of the Culture novels, but that's beside the point.

Brazzaville Beach, William Boyd, 1990
A biologically inspired choice here (there's another one later). This follows the life of Hope Clearwater, a biologist, through several strands of her life. Much of the novel takes place in a well-realised Africa, with civil war and Hope's research on primates providing its focus. The novel blends in science wonderfully, and contains some dark truths about the nature of human and animal conflict.

The Tortilla Curtain, T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1995
A great study in contrasts on either side of the wealth divide in southern California. One half of the novel follows a middle class writer, his love of the Californian wilderness and the threats he feels it's under. The other half follows a pair of illegal Mexican immigrants, pressed up against the hard realities of poverty and struggling to make ends meet. They occupy the same living space, but their worlds couldn't be more different, a theme that the novel explores as the narrative gradually weaves the two strands together. Without giving anything away, it ends with a brilliant moral cliffhanger.

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995
I simply love this novel. It may be that it embodied a time in my life that was particularly significant, but I think it's more than this. It basically tells the story of the lives of a group of Microsoft friends (the Microserfs) who quit that monolith to begin their own start-up company. That sounds rubbish, I know, but it handles the interpersonal relationships between the characters brilliantly (and lovingly), and speaks volumes about our lives today (at least to me). Anyway, it's a novel I've blogged about before (at length).

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver, 2000
Another novel influenced heavily by biology. It's spread across three distinct strands: a young hunter drifts into the life of a lone biologist tracking wolves in the forest; a former biologist suddenly has to come to terms with the death of her husband; a pair of antagonistic old timers grudgingly come to terms with one another and their lives. Beautiful writing, with a real sense of nature, but written with a biologist's appreciation of the savageness that underlies its apparent beauty.

Unless, Carol Shields, 2003
While set around the quietly domestic life of a female translator and novelist, the novel is driven by her growing anguish at the apparent breakdown in her relationship with her daughter, and her anger at the casual sexism she encounters in her working life (expressed through a series of letters that she writes during the novel). These themes are not as isolated as they appear, and they are articulated in beautifully written prose. It's a real shame that Shields died shortly after completing this novel.

The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford, 2006
The "conclusion" of a trilogy of novels about the novelist / sportswriter / realtor Frank Bascombe. It probably isn't the best of the trilogy (the second novel, Independence Day, is more solid), but it's the longest, and immersion is the key here. Ford creates an internal life for Frank that's just amazingly well-realised, and the writing describing it is simply sublime. As with the "prequels", the events of the novel take place over only a few days, but the depth and texture of the writing makes it feel like you're with Frank for years (in a good way).

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon, 2007
Ah, the perils of adding a recently read novel ... I loved this trans-genre work (see here), but it's quite possible that I'll look back in bewilderment at a later date. It tries to take on the crime, noir and (possibly) science fiction genres, weave in some Jewish themes, while using literary flourishes throughout.