The Romantic: William Boyd

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I felt that I knew what Boyd was going to describe, and how the life of the protagonist would turn out. I was also conscious that in a (literary) world that has changed enormously in the last twenty years, the characterisations were a bit dated and focused on too limiting a view of history. An early example when a young man is seduced by a randy housekeeper was flat. There’s schoolboy masturbation; there’s extraordinary fortune smiling on our main man in whatever predicament presents itself. Boys own stuff.

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. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him. Two strong women become central to the story; Contessa Raphaella Rezzo; and widow Mrs Frances (Frannie) Broome. Both women are interesting but from their character descriptions, and their actions, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two, who occupy different parts of the world, and the narrative. Boyd uses the description ‘cavaliere servante’ to describe Raphaella. He is to become a commissioned army officer in the East India Company in Madras, but taking a moral stand in Ceylon has him return to explore Europe, and to write about his travels. 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. He encounters the love of his life in Ravenna, unavailable, a passionate love which will endure, despite barely seeing each other through the years once he leaves Italy. 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. He is to get caught up in a Greek antiquities scandal as the Nicaraguan Consul in Trieste, this puts hims in such danger that he goes in hiding in Venice. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

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On Brazzaville Beach, on the edge of Africa, Hope Clearwater examines the complex circumstances that brought her there. Sifting the details for evidence of her own innocence or guilt, she tells her engrossing story with a blunt and beguiling honesty that not only intrigues and disturbs but is also completely enthralling.

Within his 80+ year lifespan, Cashel Greville Ross will fight at Waterloo where Napoleon made his last stand…enter the inner circle of Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, and the legendary Lord Byron…set out in search of the source of the Nile where he will meet up with the famed explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and the duplicitous John Hanning Speke..and become inadvertently involved in the smuggling of Greek antiquities. More seriously, we never really get the sense that Cashel is a man of his time. He is an atheist and a non-racist: he risks court-martial at one point by trying to stop his commanding officer from murdering innocent villagers in Ceylon (oh yes, he spends some time in the East India Company Army too). But the novel moves at such a pace that there is no time to explore the thought processes by which he comes to see life so differently from his contemporaries. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The life of Cashel Greville Ross encompasses taking part in the battle of Waterloo, hanging out with Shelley and Byron in Italy, prison in London, running a brewery in New England, exploring Africa and being a consul in Trieste. His life begins in 1799 and stretches to the advent of the modern age in the late Nineteenth century. 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. With his loyal servant Ignatz, he starts the first Lager brewery in America, marries, fathers two daughters, attempts to find the source of the Nile, begins a feud with Burton and Speke, becomes a Consul in Trieste, meets again the love of his youth, Countess Raphaella, but perhaps, all too late.The writing is a joy and Boyd has that skill of conjuring the sights and sounds of place and time that effortlessly transports the reader. Though this is quite a lengthy book I just didn’t want it to end. Millions die on the Western Front but in East Africa a quite different war is being waged – one with little point and which is so ignored that it will carry on after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell both sides to stop.