Love is a bore
A doomed romance in exotic settings fails to excite.
William Boyd receives three times as many fan letters about his 2002 novel, Any Human Heart, as about anything else he has written. He has some credible theories to account for this, but the overwhelming reason, surely, is that it’s a fine novel. The first-person, 20th-century-hopping adventures of Logan Mountstuart are compelling, involving and funny. Boyd went for a similar sweep of time, though less successfully, with his last novel, Sweet Caress. Now he’s sweeping again, from Edinburgh in 1894 to the Andaman Islands in 1906, as he relates the adventures of Scottish piano tuner Brodie Moncur.
To escape his bizarre and domineering clergyman father, young Brodie takes a job in Paris, where he meets famous Irish pianist John Kilbarron and his mistress, Lika, a beautiful but only averagely talented soprano. Brodie and Lika fall for each other, but the perilous and melodramatic results of their liaison force them to flee through Europe and beyond. Along the way, amongst other things, Brodie develops tuberculosis and is involved in a duel.
Logan Mountstuart is always excellent company, but travelling with Brodie Moncur soon becomes wearying and even a little tedious. The use of the third person inevitably adds distance, but the real problem, sadly, is that this is not an especially well-written book. Boyd can, as always, conjure up some good period atmosphere and evocative descriptions of landscape and interiors. (There are, though, too many accounts of food and drink and possibly rather too much information on late-19th-century piano tuning.)
But, overall, the writing has a curiously mechanical, lifeless quality and a dulling sameness of pitch.
Brodie’s love for Lika, which should be the heart of the book, is never convincing, not least because Boyd relies on sentences such as, “He felt his sphincter loosen and a bubble of air expand to fill his lungs” to convey emotion. Regrettably, this is not the only time unfortunate anatomical reactions are invoked in response to the beloved.
The acclaimed author of 14 novels, five short stories and three plays should know that this is bad. And if he doesn’t, his editor should – and tell him. The novel is distressingly full of the kinds of mistakes much less experienced writers are advised to avoid: too many rhetorical questions, a surfeit of “wondering” and “realising”, lumps of stodgy and unnecessary explanation. Several times he makes the rookie error of dropping in obvious time markers, such as having Brodie read about the Dreyfus affair, Queen Victoria’s jubilee and a review of “a shocking new novel called Dracula”. The editor should also have prevented an 1890s character from saying “at the end of the day” or mentioning his “health issues”.
Love is Blind had the narrative potential and the exotic settings to be intriguing and original, but although there are tantalising hints and glimpses of what could have been, the novel fails to fire. Missing are genuine sympathy for, and involvement with, the characters. Gone, too, is the picaresque vigour of Any Human Heart. The journey this time is far too long and becomes less and less interesting as Brodie racks up the miles. By the time he fetches up on his far-flung island, and succumbs to his last consumptive haemorrhage, it is difficult to feel anything but relief.