A Good Man in Africa

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Nothing today had been remotely how he had imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events. Here he was, strolling about the battlefield looking for his missing company like a mother searching for lost children in the park.’ The New Confessions showcases not only Boyd’s superb historical instinct but also his ability to perceive the significance of modern cultural representation through the evolution of photography, journalism and cinema. In this novel, the story of the heyday and decline of silent movies and B-westerns underlines the idea that art forms, like people, have their own biographies. The author’s attention to this fact, and to the gaps which emerge between imagination and finished work, later fuelled his 1998 spoof on the New York art world, Nat Tate, and also his forays into architecture, film and music in short fiction. Things in Morgan's personal life only get more complicated, too. Hazel gives him gonorrhea. He is still sleeping with Celia. And he's in love with Priscilla, to whom the sniveling Richard is now engaged.

But Boyd’s first novel also hinted at his sensitivity to Africa as a continent bedevilled by poverty, exploitation and misguided foreign interference. His portrait no doubt builds on his own childhood experiences in Ghana, something he discusses in the autobiographical essay included in his 1998 Protobiography. Though perpetually self-absorbed, Leafy nonetheless registers the misery and decrepitude of his surroundings in the overpopulated capital of Nkongsamba. ‘Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of vomit on somebody’s expansive unmown lawn.’ And while the plot of A Good Man is driven by a comedy of diplomatic manners, the novel also conveys the heat, sweat, and endless frustrations of a crumbling post-imperial system, with the chaos of a continent throwing into relief a legacy of British incompetence. Boyd has also published the short story collections On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Natalie ‘X’ (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008), and a collection of non-fiction, Bamboo (2005). Much of Boyd’s writing utilises the awkward intersection of private and public life, and the suffering of individuals who – like the unfortunate protagonist of his screenplay Good and Bad at Games (1983) – cannot match the cultural demands of their environment. In this respect, he is also intrigued by the way in which individuals register the intimate details of their lives, something which developed into his use of a diary or journal form in several novels. In Armadillo (1998), a low-level thriller set in a London insurance company, the central character’s journal is his means of containing and interpreting the nature of coincidence, chance, unpredictability and risk in everyday life. And a diary of sorts provides the basis for Boyd’s 1987 epic, The New Confessions, in which film-maker John James Todd’s overriding obsession with Rousseau’s Confessions becomes the basis for his own confessional memoir of a life lived, through war, romance and ambition, in tandem with the twentieth century. William Boyd grew up in Western Africa, living in both Ghana and Nigeria. He explains that the setting for the novel "is completely set in Ibadan in Western Nigeria even though I changed the names, but everybody in it is made up. It’s rooted in my autobiography in terms of its colour, texture and smells but the story is – and that’s something that’s always been the case with me – invented. There is an autobiographical element in that the character of Dr Murray is very much a two-dimensional portrait of my father." [1] Reception [ edit ] The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

When William Boyd decided that he wanted to be a writer, at the age of 19 or so, he had, he says, a fairly shadowy notion of what a writer's life might be like. The ambition descended on him in Nice, where he studied for a year between school and university and "started writing these little vignettes and mini-stories. I started to fantasise, in the way you do at that age, about my future life, and I wanted to be a novelist. But I didn't know anybody who had anything remotely to do with the world of literature, didn't know any writers or publishers or agents. The fantasy of being, as Chekhov said, a free artist was coloured by novels I'd read or movies I'd seen. That was where I got my information from. So it was a sort of parodic version: get up from the typewriter, stretch, mix yourself a drink, step out on to your balcony and look at the sea. That was the life for me ..."

I can't really explain why this paragraph from my novel The New Confessions (1987) haunts me - in fact, I could probably choose something similar from all 10 novels I have written. But The New Confessions was my fourth novel and the first in which I had tried out the first person singular. I think I relish it both because I feel the confidence implicit in the voice I was inhabiting and also because I sense in these few lines that my imagination is working at full capacity. I feel I am in Berlin in 1926 (and I know I have the details exactly right) and somehow I have managed to capture the subjective, contingent, imperfect view of life (John James Todd doesn't know why the bands are playing) that is the one we all have to live with. Boyd on Boyd He wasn't a precocious reader at that stage in his life. At Gordonstoun he wanted to be a painter, but knew his father would see art school as beyond the pale. English literature, however, was just about acceptable, and by the time he left Glasgow University, the writerly ambitions he'd conceived in Nice were "very firmly set". Seeing academia as a way to pay the rent (his father could also "see that it was vaguely a career, with a pension"), he ended up in Oxford, "teaching English as a foreign language, trying to write a thesis, teaching at St Hilda's and writing a TV column for the New Statesman - I don't know how I managed to keep all those balls in the air". His models were "people like Greene, Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. Kingsley Amis was another presence in my reading in those days. I was never drawn to magic realism or fantasy or surrealism or postmodern experimentation. I read a lot of Beryl Bainbridge, but the realist novel was what really appealed to me." In 2012 Boyd was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write an official James Bond novel, which was published in 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Fleming’s Casino Royale. Fleming himself made a cameo appearance in Any Human Heart. British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards.Lucio Schina lives in Rome and has a degree in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology. Winner of numerous national competitions for published short anthologies, he is the author of the short novel The Mysteries of the Island of Thara published by Bl … At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he re Note: William