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She’s a fine storyteller, mixing pithy anecdote with astute critical insight, and never obfuscating her ideas with impenetrable academese.
The Real and the Romantic | Frances Spalding | London Review
The fictional biography of Cashel Greville Ross takes us from his beginnings as an orphan living with his aunt in rural Ireland through the many adventures and loves in his life. Like a fine taxidermist, his craft creates such amusingly hyperreal results that you can sometimes forget what a grim business it is’ … William Boyd. I think the only time Cashel makes the running is in affairs of the heart and the name of the book is apt.Logan Mountstuart (of Boyd's Any Human Heart), Ross and The New Confessions's John James Todd are themselves almost Zelig-like figures, who are defined more by their environment and encounters than their individual traits. Boyd, like Faulks, is strongest in his depiction of the horrors and depravity of war, and the more bloody the hand to hand combat, the more striking the description. Altogether the novel felt random, and is probably realistic for it, but random doesn't constitute good art. Whilst becoming a successful author, he is swindled by his publisher, which lands him in debtor's prison, only to embark on a new life in America on release, then go on a expedition to find the source of the Nile, there he meets Richard Burton.
romantic : the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel The romantic : the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel
The watercolour painting formed part of a series of 'Chalk Figures' completed after his last one-man show in the spring of 1939, and although never formally exhibited, the Leicester Galleries in London arranged for the sale of three of them into public collections. In The Romantic we follow the life of Cashel Greville Ross who, you might be forgiven for thinking, was a real person, such is the mastery of Boyd's work. S. Eliot to Michael Tippett away from the lushness of the Victorians to a leaner mode of expression. The second of William Boyd's 'whole life' works I have read, following on from Any Human Heart, which is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I especially enjoyed finding out where in the British Museum could be found the Lion of Glymphonos, a particularly impressive piece of looted Greek statuary.But what is often lost behind the sheer pleasure brought by his books is their layered Chekhovian subtleties: Boyd is abundantly talented at capturing life’s disconnections, in prose that provides no easy consolations. At times I thought things were going to take a different direction and if anything it highlights the way that impulsive decisions shape your life and that there are always multiple ways that things could unspool. It’s not like they can’t be useful – they’ve got money, they’ve got teams of people, global reach…yes, they are businesses, so I get why they’re churning out crap stuff, one hit wonders or whatever. The majority of his paintings, therefore, went into private collections where some remain unseen to this day. Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor.
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