William Boyd (1) (1952–)

A well named novel from a popular and very talented author. This tracks the life story of a provincial Irishman making his way through a 19th century world and the social moors and difficulties of that age. A common thread throughout the whole of the book is a very Tepid approach to emotional relationships. Indeed, it is towards the end of the understands that this emotional disconnect may well have been the guiding factor with regards to the difficulties in his life. This is all doom and gloom though and he’s various romances as well as his deep friendships with People around him, really does justify his title as the romantic. Well worth reading and will stay with the reader long after it is finished.… (mer)

Great fun, rollicking journey through a man's life and the twists and turns he puts himself through, by virtue of stubborness and the demands of his heart and conscience. Echoes of Barry Lyndon and Patrick O'Brien. Very occasionally some annoying anachronisms: an army physician laments a regiment plagued by "the pox, herpes, syphilis, pubic lice and crabs". Two of these are synonyms of the other two, and herpes wasn't recognised as an STI until 60 years later. BUT this is rank carping, and I read the entire thing in one sitting during a long international flight.… (mer)

This long and interesting saga might have been more appropriately titled anything but “The Romantic”. OK, I am about to be the one who calls out all the mucking about, half truths and fantasies that comprise the life of the fictional character Boyd creates and fully embraces in this story. Don’t get the wrong impression - I liked the book, I just admit to not understanding many of the forays into whatever and wherever.

Boyd has created the fictional character of Cashel Grenville Ross, ands tries to fit his story into documented facts, reliving his life through travels, travails, neuroses and the capacity to love and leave and leave and leave while he continued to convince himself that if he had stayed everything might have worked out. He is aware of his pattern of “always moving on, leaving people he loved behind. But he hadn’t discarded them, he insisted to himself.” We are all entitled to our delusions.

The book is long, but then Cashel Grenville Ross has many anecdotes and situations to relate. Many experiences to share. Many ways he has been wronged and set upon that require explantation. Marching with his drum in the battle at Waterloo, being in the Employ of the East India Company with his bought commission, rubbing elbows with the literary geniuses of Shelley and Byron while moving from Milan, Pisa, Florence, Ravenna, exploring the origin of The Nile, farming ice and hops in Massachusetts, and never forget the time when he unwittingly consorted with antiquity robbers in Trieste - always loving and leaving along the way. In his eighty years he has lived so large, explaining that he always “did what he did because it was what he felt he had to do - right or wrong”. As the story fades, he contemplates the irony of unrequited love, “pleased with the conceit, the conception, the symbolism” of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s poem - lovers unavailable to each other, never to be reunited.

Thanks to Alfred A. Knopf and NetGalley for a copy of this outstanding literary fiction.… (mer)