The Romantic: William Boyd

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In The Romantic we follow the life of Cashel Greville Ross who, you might be forgiven for thinking, was a real person, such is the mastery of Boyd's work. Ross begins life ignominiously enough but he makes the most of the opportunities that come his way. Although I can't help thinking that things happen to Mr Ross rather than him making them occur. In fact when he does have an idea of how to proceed in life it invariably means disaster to some extent. Cashel Ross was amongst other things, a soldier, writer and felon who fought at Waterloo. He died in 1882 but left very little evidence of his life, a few autobiographical notes, letters and bills etc. Not having enough information to complete a biography William Boyd has written a fictional account of his life based on that material. William Boyd has tried on many different generic hats in his 40 years as an author, but he reports that his readers have engaged particularly deeply with his “whole life novels”. The New Confessions, Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress – purported memoirs or journals in which the narrators, whose lives all span the first 70-odd years of the 20th Century, record decades’ worth of being buffeted by historical upheaval and complex personal relationships – look set to be Boyd’s monuments.

On the first of very many whims, he signs up to the army, and finds himself pitched into the Battle of Waterloo, his survival of which automatically makes him a war hero. Now that he has tasted adventure, he wants more. And, courtesy of the author, whose pen sometimes can’t quite keep up the pace, he gets it. From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century. It is hard to think of another contemporary author who quietly marches his readers so relentlessly towards deathIt is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as the very English wife and mother Sally Gilmartin — but once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment. This time though Eva can’t do it alone: she needs her daughter’s help. Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity. The sense of Cashel hopping from episode to episode as dictated by the demands of history but unrestrained by the trammels of the standard confected plot feels wonderfully refreshing – bittiness becomes a virtue. As usual, Boyd also fills in some historical lacunae with teasing ingenuity, providing, for example, a new explanation for the mysterious death of the explorer John Hanning Speke (oh yes, I forgot to mention Cashel finds time to join an expedition to discover the source of the Nile).

The problem with The Romantic isn’t that it’s too emotional (read: sentimental). It’s that it gives you lots of second-hand spectacle and no fresh feeling Unfortunately Cashel Greville Ross doesn’t have the charisma of Boyd’s earlier “whole-life” heroes – or heroine, in the case of Sweet Caress. Like Amory Clay in that novel, John James Todd (in The New Confessions) and Logan Mountstuart (in Any Human Heart) were born shortly before World War One and their lives encapsulate the 20th century whose twists and ironies Boyd instinctively knows well. He is less at home in the preceding century and, as a result, The Romantic fails to achieve the same depth and focus, while often flirting with the superficial and absurd. “What’s going on in the world, Ross, do you know? I haven’t seen a newspaper in months,” a friend asks in the south of France, to which the Romantic unromantically replies: “Neither have I. In Arles, the other day, I heard that Simon Bolivar was made the President of Peru.” It must have been the talk of the town! A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century.

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The fictional biography of Cashel Greville Ross takes us from his beginnings as an orphan living with his aunt in rural Ireland through the many adventures and loves in his life.

Headlong momentum often takes its toll on narrative coherence but there are many incidental pleasures. Even if Boyd never signals that, in the Pisan spring, Byron was actually writing Don Juan, the greatest poem to be published in English between Paradise Lost and The Prelude, there is still a moving description of Shelley’s drowning in a schooner named Don Juan, and his auto-da-fé on the beach at Viareggio is skilfully adapted from Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. This has been a central question of many of the stronger novels by the contemporaries who joined Boyd on Granta’s famous 1983 Best of Young British Novelists list: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot , Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy could all be said to be about the leftovers of a life – and what remains of history. In such company, Boyd is sometimes seen as a more “accessible” or “commercial” writer. But what is often lost behind the sheer pleasure brought by his books is their layered Chekhovian subtleties: Boyd is abundantly talented at capturing life’s disconnections, in prose that provides no easy consolations. This may be why the “whole life” novel, exemplified by Any Human Heart , occupies such a special place in his body of work, and why it is satisfying to see him return to this cradle-to-grave territory. The second of William Boyd's 'whole life' works I have read, following on from Any Human Heart, which is one of the best books I've read in recent years.But one thing that does stand out is that he never gives up. He doesn’t dwell on his misfortune but simple strides boldly on to the next adventure. He is a glass half full guy, a romantic. Is he ‘the worlds biggest preposterous romantic fool, or a man who knows what true love is.’ The hero of the novel spends his early childhood in Ireland and his birth is surrounded with mystery… Now he is in England and goes to school there… He runs away from home… He is a young brave soldier… He’s wounded in the battle… He is a lieutenant in the Indian army… He is obliged to leave… I suspect that if you ask a type of reader to align William Boyd with another writer of his generation the name Sebastian Faulks will come up. Faulks is quoted on the book cover endorsing The Romantic. I think there’s quite a similarity in the two writers’ output. Boyd, like Faulks, is strongest in his depiction of the horrors and depravity of war, and the more bloody the hand to hand combat, the more striking the description. An early Boyd novel is An ice Cream War set in World War One, in Africa. Boyd doesn’t glamorise bloodshed, and in the Romantic the fate of Cashel’s comrade Croker will stay with me. Hand to hand fighting, as depicted in the Battle of Waterloo, was not fun. I think the only time Cashel makes the running is in affairs of the heart and the name of the book is apt. He is a true romantic. From affairs of the heart to wanting to be a success at anything, Cashel Ross finds himself generally outplayed, outwitted and taken advantage of at every turn.

When it comes to his description of love stories, and dalliances, Boyd is rather old fashioned. I did like Cashel’s definition of love “to care more about the person you loved than you did about yourself” (444). A romantic, properly speaking, is someone who believes that emotion should prevail over reason. But the problem with The Romantic isn’t that it’s too emotional (read: sentimental). It’s that it gives you lots of second-hand spectacle and no fresh feeling. Rather than a voyage of discovery, it’s a tour of familiar landmarks.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatr