Time travel
An Irish Everyman survives the tumult of global history through luck, wit, and unfettered joy
This is the kind of novel that William Boyd does best, the tale of an Everyman caught in the waves of history, sometimes surviving by his wits, other times sinking by his shortcomings. This eponymous romantic is Cashel Greville Ross, born in 1799. He spends part of his childhood in a working-class cottage in Ireland, and the rest in a comfortable suburban house in England. This change in living stature stems from the earliest of multiple deceptions that Cashel experiences during his life: “It was like something from a fable or a fairy story, he thought — except it was all true and had happened to him. … It was as if his existence, his very being, had been turned upside down and inside out.”
Cashel responds to this turmoil by joining the army. He is present as a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo, a grisly experience that haunts him, but one that also lends him a certain cachet. Then, confronted by further family secrets, Cashel bolts again, taking up a commission as a lieutenant in the Madras Presidency Army of the Honourable East India Company: “…maybe it would be an advantage to be far away from these secrets, to have a life alone, lived on his terms, and shed all these halftruths, lies and pretences that seemed to cluster around him whatever he did. Let me find my own way, he thought. Let me go to India.” This is not the last time in his life that Cashel will choose to vamoose: His pivots in the face of challenging circumstances mesh synergistically with his ability to reinvent himself, and Boyd excels at capturing Cashel’s fancies and restlessnesses, his all-consuming responses to life’s charms and disappointments. In other words, Boyd’s made Cashel into an infinitely pleasurable travel companion.
Cashel’s life in India is, at first, indolent and cushy, complete with a wealthy roommate and regular chats
over chess with canny Dr. Freemantle. But when Cashel is mobilized for action in Ceylon, the horrific outcome reveals not just his own moral backbone but the arrogant wielding of violence and the extremities of deception that others go to in order to remain in power. On his trip homeward, Cashel meets Cornelius Poynter, and, inheriting Poynter’s book collection, he reads his way through Shakespeare, Dante, Spinoza, and others. In Paris, Cashel gets to know yet another gentle mentor-philosopher, Dimitri Karlinsky. The kind sensibilities and intelligence-stimulations of Poynter, Freemantle, and Karlinsky don’t merely offer fresh father-figures to a Cashel in search of himself; they offer him models of good people as well.
Cashel decides to stay in Europe, to see the world and write about it. (“Perhaps that was what he would become — a writer — and his first book would be An Account of a Journey through Europe by Cashel Greville Ross.”) Fortified by his decision, he wends his way across Europe, filling endless notebooks with his observations.
Then, in Pisa, an altercation with a thief lands Cashel an introduction to the writers Mary Shelley and Jane Williams. Soon he’s living it up with the Shelleys and Lord Byron, completely in thrall to their extended group’s dubious relationships. Still, it’s his acquaintance with Byron that delivers Cashel one of his most powerful and long-lasting experiences, a coup de foudre on meeting the Contessa Raphaella Rezzo. As smitten as a school boy, he immediately imagines their names, entwined: “Raphaella and Cashel. Cashel and Raphaella.”
This takes us less than a third of the way into the book. Cashel still has so much ahead of him: being celebrated as the literary toast of England and Ireland; cooling his heels in debtors’ prison; buying a farm outside Boston; becoming a brewmaster and an ice merchant; donning his explorer’s outfit on a bid to discover the source of the Nile; and, in a particularly hilarious scenario, being mistaken for Ivan Turgenev.
Boyd has enormous fun describing real-life people through Cashel’s eyes. In his explorer’s phase, while dining with explorer Richard Burton and John Speke, Cashel becomes overwhelmed: “…Cashel suddenly began to tire under his onslaught of words. The force of Burton’s manic personality was very wearing. … Burton, Cashel realized, was an example of pure, unalloyed self-regard. … This kind of solipsism, this raging indifference to others, was almost fascinating. … He imagined Burton haranguing the saltcellar and the empty decanter of port, perfectly happy to have them as an audience.” Or, as another character notes about Burton: “‘You can be damned intelligent — he speaks twenty languages, you know — and the world’s biggest bore at the same time.’”
Cashel is both moral and observant — except when he is not; he gets duped by nefarious agents, but sometimes gets a chance to outsmart his enemies. He straddles enormous technical developments and changes, from chamber-pots to flushing toilets, letter-writing to telegraphs, horse-drawn carriages to air balloons and elevators. “He would not have missed it,” he realizes. For Cashel is an embracer of life, and that aspect of him engenders enormous loyalty as well as true love.
Like all of Boyd’s best work, “The Romantic” is steeped in both gentle melancholy and unfettered joy, as well as the recognition that allowing yourself to be buffeted by the winds of change makes life both alarming and interesting. “‘You always listened to your heart, Cashel, that was your nature,’” notes a friend. “‘How could you have done anything different?’” And, thanks to Boyd, we’re included on that turbulent, magnificent ride.