Love is Blind

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WILLIAM BOYD has received world-wide acclaim for his novels which have been translated into over thirty languages. It’s a classic example of Boyd getting things off to a propulsive start, and on the surface Love Is Blind has all the hallmarks of a slow-burning thriller – the event-packed story of a single decade in Brodie’s life. I wasn’t quite sure about his weird and dysfunctional family (especially his repulsive father) other than as a device to get him to leave Scotland and stay away. But a chance meeting with a talented musician sends Brodie in a downward spiral, defining his life for years to come.

I've now read a dozen or so of his books and I'm blown away by his inventiveness, the diversity of his stories and above all the way in which, in his best work, he invites the reader to become a part of the story – to become, in fact, the lead character and to experience their life as if it were your own. If the Nicobars seemed strange and their beliefs outlandish, then so were ours, Brodie thought, seen from another perspective. He also wrote the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist -- the publication of which, in the spring of 1998, caused something of a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. I felt the strong emotional turmoil this man faced, both in his early family life and his later years as he struggled to gain a grip over his unattainable object of affection. But then it began to fizzle out as more and more characters disappeared and less and less began to happen.

I read Any Human Heart when it came out in 2002 and, like hundreds of thousands, loved it immediately. 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. Brodie Moncur, a young man gifted with an extraordinary accurate musical ear, but not enough talent to become a concert pianist, is a resourceful and methodical piano tuner instead.

Interestingly, I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of loving a book more than many others on GR. He seems to get entangled with and taken advantage of by unpleasant people with some regularity – although he sees through them, his desire to earn money and not give in seems to lead him to a sort of stasis. It’s what the novel’s about: these are the implacable forces majeures that shape our haphazard lives and our complicated, unresolved relationships with others.Yet as this is 1897, and as the Russian is a doctor in his late thirties who is staying in the Pension Russe, drinking fermented mare’s milk in a bid to keep consumption at bay, and as Chekhov did all of those things too, I think we can safely say that we have Anton on deck.

Sooner or later, the gambler will lose his entire float, the losses from which will balance out the modest winnings. If he had claimed that its protagonist, Brodie Moncur was a real-life consumptive Scottish piano-tuner of genius, working for John Kilbarron, (“the Irish Liszt”), the real-life piano virtuoso to promote Scottish Channon grand pianos around Europe in the late 1890s, it would be easy enough for us all to check whether he was telling porkies. This has all the inimitable style and qualities of an epic character driven William Boyd novel, of love, passion, obsession and music within a historical period presaging the great changes in the world at the end of the nineteenth century.This man-on-the-run tale, which wraps up at one exotic end of the Earth, is strangely ageless and very entertaining. At first glance, this historical travelogue-cum-romance follows in the vein of Boyd’s earlier successes such as Any Human Heart and Waiting for Sunrise, being a beautifully written and deeply humane account of its protagonist’s journey through a specific historical period: in this case, fin-de-siècle Scotland, France and Russia.