Love is Blind

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Boyd has long been a master of the technical aspects of fiction-writing, and in Love is Blind this is again in evidence: plotting, pacing and historical detail are all adroitly handled, and he succeeds in making the world of piano tuning—as well as the wider milieu of fin de siècle Europe—come alive. Brodie is a gifted piano tuner, and Boyd goes into some depth to give us detailed insights of all that this involves. It's at this point that John Kilbarron (the ‘Irish Listz’) enters the picture… together with his lover, Lika. Brodie is plucked from a dull piano showroom in Edinburgh to lend support at the company's troubled Paris flagship.

Boyd has always been a brilliant chronicler of both character and place and his evocations of Paris, St Petersburg and, in the book’s final act, the Andaman Islands are especially strong; his settings are not sanitised or clean, but vibrantly alive, full of the hum and filth of life. Likewise, James Hogg’s great novel of paranoia and pursuit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is referred to both in Moncur’s Scottish origins and in the fashion in which Malachi Kilbarron comes to seem an implacable, near-supernatural pursuer; the metaphysical implications remain tantalisingly alive right until the end. Again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the past catches up to them, and in their moment of panic, Lika leaves Brodie for another man. Boyd beautifully paints the settings and the moods they evoke while sending readers on Brodie’s adventurous, troublesome, and transformative journey.I felt sympathetic towards him and his grand amour, despite his stubborn refusal to acknowledge Lika’s ultimately cruel treatment of him.

The doctor recommends that Brodie Moncur leaves Paris for a sunnier, drier climate and that he avoids emotional turmoil, if possible. I grew to care deeply for the main protagonist, Brodie Moncur, in his blind love/obsession which takes over his life and this novel and leads us all on a tour of France, Russia, Ireland, Scotland and the Andaman Islands. If the authorial technique apparent in Love Is Blind occasionally verges on cleverness for its own sake, there are numerous compensations.Brodie’s trade was interesting to follow and I felt that Boyd captured the inner workings of this form of employment with a strong air of authenticity.

The descriptions are delightful, accurate both in their detail and in their relaying of historical events of the time. I will try not to spoil them, but like a musical theme in a symphony, a simple country song that Brodie wrote down for Lika in Paris will haunt their every moment of illicit happiness. I did enjoy the television adaptation of Boyd’s literary composition Any Human Heart, so I hope to explore the writing of this decorated author in the future. In any case, however, there are only flickers of the charm you would want to steadily emanate from such a period production.All those New York art experts at the party who claimed to know his work had been well and truly fooled. As Brodie and Lika travel around, the novel tells us "between them, they made a modest living, supplemented by their nights gambling with the martingale system in Biarritz’s casino. From 1861 to her death twenty-three years later, Brodie had recently calculated, she had given birth to fourteen children, five of them stillborn or dead within days of their parturition. So we shouldn’t perhaps be too surprised that the Lika here in his new novel – also a blonde, buxom, would-be opera singer – is very like the Lika there.