The Romantic: William Boyd

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The first play by bestselling author William Boyd, Longing adapts two of Anton Chekhov’s short stories, A Visit to Friends and My Life, to weave a comic tale, at once exotic and familiar. There is a gleeful attitude in playing fast and loose with history and certain details, such as the unfortunate end of the Nile explorer John Hanning Speke, which could easily have emerged from the pages of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman chronicles. Yes, there’s a love story so Cashel is a romantic in that respect but he is also a romantic in outlook, being driven by impulse and circumstance, rather than by thoroughly thought through plans. If I felt I’d trodden this path with Boyd before then that’s because I have: Any Human Heart and The New Confessions each followed the life of a man through the course of the 20th Century. Cashel Greville Ross was born somew

As a consequence the denouement, when it finally comes in his eighties, offers no surprise or satisfaction cf. On the contrary, Boyd stuffs his life story so full of incident and adventure that it verges on the absurd. He’s a likeable, decent and well-meaning character who helps others, with as the title suggests a strong romantic side.Ross, the illegitimate son of the big house, a drummer boy at Waterloo, an officer in the Indian Army refusing to carry out an atrocity, by his late twenties he has partied with Byron and the Shelleys in Italy, had a frenzied affair with an Italian noblewoman, published his first novel, been defrauded, imprisoned for debt and emigrated to the United States to build an ideal community. In trying to steer Ross's fictional biography around certain 'documented facts', the overall arc of Ross's life is lost, as is the overall arc of events.

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. Towards the end, his grand inamorata sighs that her life has been “all very boring, compared to [yours]”. Ross is a headstrong and an impulsive character, so his reaction to a situation or an idea is to rush into action.

William Boyd is a must-read author for me; I’ve enjoyed his novels, short stories and non-fiction for many years, but it’s his three ‘full-life’ novels (The New Confessions, Any Human Heart, and now, The Romantic) that I love most. He died in 1882 but left very little evidence of his life, a few autobiographical notes, letters and bills etc. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

On the plot side The Romantic is smartly stylized to the Victorian novel but it is written the modern explicit manner. The reason he is more or less unheard of is due to the fact someone else always seems to beat him to the punch. Cashel Greville Ross, the hero of William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic, is a man who does plenty of wandering and whose path through life changes direction many times. I tore through it in two days and while it's not quite as masterful as Any Human Heart, it is very, very good.Admittedly it is a fair criticism that you do eventually come to expect the inevitable outcome of his endeavours. It's not overlong as some fictional autobiographies can be and you get some very famous names thrown in for good measure as Cashel Greville Ross continues his adventures from Waterloo to the discovery of the source of the Nile. It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system. I’d enjoyed it to this point but now I was somewhat obsessed about knowing how this would all conclude. In the process he gains both friends and enemies leading him to adopt new identities from time to time.

In Pisa and Lerici, he meets and gets to know Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord 'Albe' Byron and Claire Clairemont, becoming privy to the tangle of intrigue and rivalries within the group.However, as we know from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’.