NOTHING BUT A GOOD TIME
TRIO by William Boyd (Viking) ★★★✩✩
WILLIAM Boyd has long swapped the narrative experiment of his early work for spy romps and action romances that, while often barely credible, keep you agog with infectious charm. He stays true to form in his new novel, a madly zig-zagging caper set against the backdrop of the British movie industry in the Swinging Sixties.
We flit between three characters on the scene of a dodgily financed movie being shot in Brighton. Anny, the film’s American lead, beds her pop-singer co-star while fending off her ex-husband, a left-wing terrorist on the run.
Then there’s her put-upon producer, Talbot, a gay ex-squaddie afraid that his business partner is on the take and there’s Elfrida, the director’s wife, a writer losing her mind to drink.
Boyd keeps us guessing how all their threads will connect, building layers of intrigue around each character in a feat of narrative plate-spinning that initially proves highly enjoyable. Yet halfway through with new characters still popping up and ever-crazier storylines emerging, you can’t help but wonder if it’s all just a tease.
Is Trio a send-up of showbiz backbiting? An exploration of gay life in the wake of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act? Or is it even (in one of the novel’s unlikelier twists) an espionage thriller about French colonial history? While he flirts with all these and more, Boyd’s scope is ultimately broad, not deep.
I’m not sure he cares, though – he’s out for a good time here, and it’s to his credit that he remembers to make sure his readers get one, too.