Perfect pitch on an imperfect hero

William Boyd has, during the last 20-odd years, garnered the kind of recognition most writers only dream of. His first novel, “A Good Man in Africa,” won both the Whitbread Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Ignoring the conventional wisdom that after so auspicious a start, the follow-up has to be an anticlimax, a year later he knocked off “An Ice-Cream War,” which not only collected the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize but also was short-listed for the Booker. “Brazzaville Beach” picked up the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, while “The Blue Afternoon” collected the Sunday Express Book of the Year award in Britain and this paper’s own Book Prize in fiction.

Yet throughout this coruscating series of triumphs, Boyd himself has remained extraordinarily elusive. Unlike Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, he has never entered the public imagination as, in some sense, the protagonist of his own fictional world. One good reason for this may well have been the disconcerting fact that each book presented a new and completely different world, so that their author began to seem, first, a chameleon, and, finally, a kind of magician or trickster. This may not be far from the truth. He began in West Africa with a seedy regime and a disaster-prone hero like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim revamped for Greeneland. Other protagonists have included a mestizo surgeon in the Philippines of early 20th century, a London financier up to his neck in shady business and a struggling film auteur whose life -- like that of Logan Mountstuart in “Any Human Heart” -- spans the whole of the 20th century.

All these worlds are presented with a remarkable array of background knowledge and technical expertise, not to mention familiarity with the speech patterns and characteristic habits of figures who, for Boyd, are ancient history. He was born in 1952, when I was working on a war-delayed PhD: I only mention this because for the ‘30s and ‘40s I can check his imagination against personal memory, and he hardly ever puts a foot wrong. Most unusually, and almost alone among British novelists, he also really understands America, its multiple cultures and idioms. The terrifying title story in his collection “On the Yankee Station” not only takes us through the technical maze of launching fighter planes from an aircraft carrier but also highlights a murderous conflict between a jittery Phantom pilot and a member of his maintenance crew. It’s useless asking the real William Boyd to please stand up: He’s far too busy playing Prospero to his imaginative creations. About the only thing his books have in common is that every one of them is dedicated to his wife (Auden’s poem “Who’s Who” comes to mind here).

Boyd is regularly compared to Conrad and Maugham: wrongly, I think, in both cases. He’s more straightforward than the first and far less platitudinously class-bound than the second. His technical expertise suggests rather a kind of Electronic Age Kipling, while the sad virtuosity of the countless sexual encounters he chronicles carries an odd mingled flavor of those two very different Catholic novelists, Greene and Anthony Burgess. What I think the comparison is due to -- and this may well also explain the prizes he has amassed -- is his exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense, imaginative detail, about characters endowed with complex, and convincing, emotional lives. This is no mean achievement, and his new novel, operating on the same vast panoramic 20th century canvas as “The New Confessions,” lets him display all his multifarious talents to the full, including expertise in modern art: the painter Nat Tate (about whom he wrote a monograph) appears as a minor character in “Any Human Heart,” and one of his paintings figures on the dust jacket.

What Boyd offers us this time is one creative tour de force enshrined inside another: not merely the fictional life of Logan Mountstuart, minor novelist, art fancier, man-about-town and wartime intelligence agent, but this fiction presented as Mountstuart’s bona fide journals, complete with lacunae, editorial notes and linking passages, and a remarkably thorough index. I have to say at once that the ventriloquist’s magic demonstrated here is quite uncanny: Like one of the British reviewers cited on the back cover, I too found myself almost reading the journals as genuine, not least because of the skill with which Boyd throughout has contrived to catch what the reviewer called “the artless and random qualities of every diary.” We watch Mountstuart’s evolution from schoolboy to undergraduate to London writer; we travel with him to Valencia and Madrid in 1937, and on a farcical and catastrophic wartime venture to Switzerland organized by Ian Fleming’s backroom boys of the Naval Intelligence Division; we sample the buccaneering New York art world of the ‘50s; Nigeria and Biafra in the ‘60s; London poverty, illness and another farcical intelligence trip in the ‘70s; and, finally, a kind of hard-won peace during the ‘80s in an old country house in southwest France.

Now the first thing that strikes us about Mountstuart’s life is how cleverly Boyd interlaces it with real events and characters, many of the latter getting walk-on parts in the activities Mountstuart records. In Oxford he meets Peter Quennell, Anthony Powell, Henry Green and a sexually active young drunk he’s convinced is Waugh. Like Cyril Connolly (whom he also encounters), he graduates with a third-class degree in history. At the famous salon at Garsington, outside Oxford, he sneers at a famous remark of Virginia Woolf’s and gets cold-shouldered as a result. In Paris, where, very fashionably, he feels free, he hobnobs with a hard-drinking Ernest Hemingway, buys art at dirt-cheap prices by names like Paul Klee and Juan Gris and develops a fixation on a pre-World War I literary group known as Les Cosmopolites.

At Biarritz he meets the prince of Wales and during the early part of World War II is sent to keep an eye on the now duke of Windsor in the Bahamas (his sketch of the ducal couple, and the famous scandal connected with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, is etched in pure acid). From the poet David Gascoyne, postwar, he takes tips about sticking to “diurnal minutiae” in a diary and forgetting great world events. This advice is duly followed. The journal ends with a marvelous description of deep rural tranquillity in his French country haven.

Why should we care, as we do by the end, about Logan Mountstuart? In many ways he is neither pleasant nor rewarding. He establishes so remarkable a track record for bedding the wives and girlfriends of his dearest male buddies (the first time as the indirect result of a bet at school) that I began to wonder whether Boyd meant us to see him as a severely repressed homosexual. His own first marriage, to an earl’s daughter, no less, is entered into vaguely and abused with defiant zest. Marital relationships generally in his world are miserable failures, leading to divorce, nervous breakdown or suicide. The one great love of his life, his second wife, Freya, not only believes, wrongly, that he died in 1944 but is herself, shortly after her subsequent remarriage, killed by a buzz bomb, along with their one daughter, so that when Logan resurfaces from two years’ Swiss internment on a betrayed wartime mission, he’s clobbered by Fate all over again. This, incidentally, is also when the reader first begins to suspect that he may have some genuine, decent emotional responses to life.

Boyd takes tremendous risks in making this not over-talented, ambitious sensualist draw so full and unflattering a portrait of himself. That he succeeds so triumphantly is chiefly a tribute to the never-failing realism of his historical ghost-raising, the rich and loving detail with which he invests each fresh scene and character, the pitch-perfect ear with which he catches the musings, not only of Logan himself but also of his friends and relatives, at each successive stage of their lives. And for this, as the Grossmith brothers proved with the classic “The Diary of a Nobody,” your protagonist doesn’t need to be clever or dominating, let alone nice (Logan in fact is always getting rolled by the sharks). What Boyd has created is a seedy, sexually grubby, literary Everyman to carry the shabby banner of the last century’s British upper-middle classes: As such, Logan is irresistible. I’ve already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?