The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
‘The usual nightmare experiences’
William Boyd draws on his TV and movie work for ‘Trio’
Forty years ago this month, William Boyd’s first novel, the satirical “A Good Man in Africa,” was published to great acclaim, winning the Somerset Maugham Award and the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel … even though it was technically Boyd’s fourth.
“While getting a postgraduate degree and teaching at Oxford University, I wrote three novels, which all ended up in a drawer,” he recalls. “They were like my apprentice work, so my first published novel was really my fourth novel, which is why it had a ring of confidence.”
No matter how you count, Boyd has racked up an impressive run in the past four decades. Beyond the short stories, screenplays, plays, articles and essays, he has published 15 more novels. His latest, “Trio,” “is a comedy of sorts, but darker,” he says.
It tells three intersecting tales of life on the set of a wacky 1960s British film called “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon.” Talbot Kydd is a film producer nearing 60 who still hasn’t accepted his true nature; Elfrida Wing is the wife of the philandering director and a former successful novelist whose writer’s block is exacerbated by her alcoholism; and Anny Viklund is the gorgeous young American film star with a penchant for making unwise decisions.
The thing “Trio” has in
common with Boyd’s other novels is that it’s very different: His previous book, “Love Is Blind,” was set among piano players and tuners in 1880s France and Russia, “Stars and Bars” was a contemporary book about a British art appraiser in America; “The Blue Afternoon” was set in the 1930s. He was even hired to write a James Bond novel, “Solo.”
Boyd spoke by Zoom from his home in southwestern France about his new novel and his approach to writing. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q Did your career in movies and TV provide you with fodder for “Trio”?
A I’ve had the usual nightmare experiences, and I’ve heard a lot of shocking stories of bad behavior where perfectly responsible adults start behaving like 3-year-olds, so that all fed into the making of this film. Believe me, nothing is exaggerated — the things that can go wrong are mindboggling.
Q Your books always have quirky and fascinating names: “Trio’s” three protagonists are Talbot Kydd, Anny Viklund and Elfrida Wing. Why is that important?
A I say to young writers that when you christen any character, even if they’re only in the book for a couple of pages, you should make an effort.
Pick something memorable. Talbot Kydd isn’t particularly odd, but it sticks in your mind more than Jonathan Brown. You don’t have to go the full Dickensian route, but take time to name them and they’ll begin to live and breathe.
If such things still existed, you could open a phone book and see people have the oddest names. In England, there’s a man named Henry Dent Brocklehurst who’s a bit of a celebrity and he married a woman named Lili Maltese, so I defend my slightly odd names resolutely.
I was taken to task by a British critic once who said, “Boyd always has these strangely named characters.” The critic’s name was James Delingpole. I thought, “Hang on, pot … kettle.”
Q Do you plot everything out first or figure it out as you go?
A I spend so long figuring it out, with notebooks filled with plans and schematic diagrams of the novel. I know exactly how it’s going to end before I start on Page 1. My writing is not exactly swift but it’s confident.
Q
Why do you still write your first drafts in longhand?
A It’s partly habit, but I do think there’s a different writing experience. The screen is always perfect, so immaculate, so it’s easy to add another subordinate clause or take out an adjective. With pen and paper, you have to look at the mess you’re creating on the page. If you keep crossing out words and putting bubbles and arrows, you have physical evidence that it’s not going smoothly but you’re also more aware of the cadence and rhythm. I’m also more verbose when I write on
screen. If you’re writing by hand and you’re on line four and haven’t reached the period then your sentence is probably out of control.
Q
Your novels cover a wide range of topics and eras and tones. Do you push yourself to mix things up or is it just about the ideas that occur to you? A I’m not an autobiographical writer, so I’m looking for something
that stimulates me. My next novel takes place in the beginning of the 19th century. I got this idea
and seized me. Of course, bits of my life do intrude in my stories but I’m really thinking, “What can I spend the next three years on?” I do want to write something different and don’t want to write essentially the same book twice or three times, as many writers who draw very heavily on their own lives do. Q Your writing not autobiographical, is resolutely but do you think your childhood — your parents are Scottish but you grew up in Ghana
and Nigeria — and lack of firm roots shaped your writing? A When people ask, “Where are you from?” I say, “How much time have you got?”
It had a profound and subliminal effect. It made me an outsider obviously in Africa, but also when I came back to the U.K. for six weeks in the summer or for boarding school, and I felt more at home in Nigeria than in Edinburgh. Being a stranger contributed to the way I look on the human condition and the worlds I encounter from a slightly distanced point of view.
Q And then your father and wife’s mother died a month apart when you were in your 20s. Again, even if that’s not directly factoring into stories, it must have had an impact.
A It kind of rocks you and it shapes the way you react to the world as an individual. I’m sure it permeates your writing; it does educate you very quickly in the random nature of the human condition, so you harden yourself and prepare yourself for eventualities. In all my novels, good luck and bad luck play a defining role in everybody’s life.
Q “Trio” is frequently described as a comic novel, but that sounds lightweight for a book that is funny yet suffused with a loneliness that leads to isolation and desperation that brings on despair. How do you feel about that phrase?
A I often describe myself as a “serious comic novelist.” I’m happy to be described as a comic novelist but I have dark undercurrents beneath the flippant This and novel facetious is about surface. the secret individual lurking beneath the public face and how that split can be coped with.
I do see the world through a comic lens rather than a tragic lens and tap into a black humor.
I revere Anton Chekhov’s short stories and he sees the world as an absurd place, not with a hand-wringing, woe is me, isn’t life appalling perspective. He said, “All my tragedies are at root comedies.”