Close to the bone
William Boyd’s artful new collection suffers for its grating echoes of real life.
The timing was unfortunate. I read this short-story collection at the height of #metoo, when every day brought with it a new scalp: Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, John Lasseter, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer … on and greasily on.
So, to be clear: William Boyd’s stories are, of course, beautifully written. Clean, wry, self-contained – the prolific Scottish writer’s long experience and self-assurance are evident on every page.
But the true stories zinging in from all angles make some of his offerings seem uncomfortably old hat. In particular, the seven short stories that make up the first section of the collection: they are permeated by sex and delusion and a general sense of grasping.
First up is Ludo Abernathy, a dodgy art dealer who is married but is convinced that kissing is not cheating. We’re asked to live this rationalisation with him, along with his perving at women he encounters, and his recollections of serial shagging around during his previous marriages. His eventual comeuppance just isn’t sweet enough to make up for all that forced vicarious staring and slobbering.
The Road Not Taken features a professor who is the sort of guy who sleeps with his students and touches the belly of a pregnant woman without asking.
Later, in The Diarists, a farce plays out at a garden party packed with shallow intellectuals. Yet again, it focuses on the desires of men, and by this point I’d had quite a gutsful of that.
If Boyd is trying to skewer these men, he succeeds most in his depiction of venom: the way they turn nasty when thwarted.
In Humiliation, an indignant author exacts strange and unusual revenge on a reviewer who wrote him off (and who, crucially, happens to be with a woman he fancies). Unsent Letters follows a struggling film-maker as he flips from flattery to abuse.
But all said, it’s a relief to leave this section behind and enter a novella set in the sweetly deluded world of 24-yearold Bethany Mellmoth. Compared with the men who populate this book, Bethany’s desires and ambitions are gentle and flighty: she feels destined to be a singer – no, an author – no, an actress. Doesn’t work out? Never mind. Try something else. Around all this flitting and pottering she navigates her broken family, breaks it a bit more, then puts it together again, sort of. That aside, we leave Bethany as we met her, with the sense that we’ve seen a vignette of what will be a dip-in/dip-out sort of life. And that’s okay.
Brace for a whiplash change of pace in The Vanishing Game: An Adventure. Another novella, it’s the best of this bunch – although it was, apparently, commissioned by Land Rover.
A few years back, Boyd wrote Solo, a Bond book, and that comes through loud and clear. We’re on an off-road adventure on the Scottish coast. There’s a mysterious flask of holy water, a decrepit stone church, whisky, a dangerous blonde. Explosives. And a trusty Land Rover, of course.
It’s a much-needed jaunt – a blast of fresh air in a collection that otherwise felt largely stale and, at times, repellent.
Compared with the men who populate this book, Bethany’s desires and ambitions are gentle and flighty.