Love is Blind

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Between 1980 and 1983 Boyd was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was also a television critic for the New Statesman between 1981 and 1983. [4] I wish to thank Penguin Books Australia for providing me with a free copy of this book for review purposes. We first encounter him in 1896, in the window of Channon & Co, an Edinburgh piano shop, where he works as a tuner. At 24, he’s handsome and has perfect pitch, but is also (in a slight twist on the archetypal blind piano tuner) severely short-sighted. Without his “Franklin” bifocal spectacles, the world appears to Brodie as nothing more than a vague mist, “utterly aqueous”; it’s an early sign that this young Scotsman’s vision is not necessarily to be trusted.

Brodie’s improbable final leap takes him to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where he ends up working for an eccentric Margaret Mead-like anthropologist who is studying the sexual lives of the locals (Boyd has always been interested in writing about sex and its peculiar mechanics).

To be indifferent to prizes is a wonderful position to be in. I’ve won lots of prizes over the years, but they don’t make any difference to me. My sales are extremely good and that’s the position you want to be in as a novelist.” Frejdh, Anders (7 January 2013). "UK Release of William Boyd's 007 Novel: Solo". From Sweden With Love . Retrieved 10 April 2020. Love is blind” may seem like a tired proverb, but it fits literally and figuratively as a theme for the protagonist in Boyd’s new novel, which spans over a decade at the turn of the 19th century. Brodie Moncur is a 24-year-old handsome, educated gentleman, a first-rate piano tuner in Edinburgh,with perfect pitch and attention to detail. He has poor vision, though, and depends on his Franklin bifocals; otherwise the world appears “utterly aqueous.” Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers.

Except of course this system is based on a mathematical fallacy. Even if the chances of winning were genuinely 2-to-1 (in practice, roulette is biased to the house) the expected winnings are zero. The last sentence highlights why - you don't just need a 'substantial float', you need an infinite one (and a casino prepared to extend you infinite credit lines). Sooner or later, the gambler will lose his entire float, the losses from which will balance out the modest winnings. I assumed that the flaw in the system would ultimately form a key plot point - but when it didn't it caused me to wonder if the author saw the flaw. a b Mesure, Susie (16 December 2012). "William Boyd: The man who knows the real 007". The Independent on Sunday . Retrieved 10 March 2018. You could say,’ Vere mused, ‘that, looking at it from one angle, you’re having an amazing Russian literary experience.’" Excepting the excentric John Killbaran, the characters seem bloodless. The characters move around a lot and things happen, but we never really get into their heads or their hearts. What kind of a woman Lydia/Lika really is remains to the end a mystery. In the beginning, she is presented as a vivacious femme fatale, only to relax comfortably into a being a somewhat plump mistress and then goes on, surprisingly, to become an entrepreneuse and a practically-minded grand dame. All we really know is, as we are repeatedly told, is that she is the woman Brodie loves. Brodie himself is getting along well in life as a debonair bachelor until he meets Lika, and from then on, she is really all he cares about. Brodie doesn’t see well. Love is blind, Get it? Where, you begin to wonder, is Boyd going with all this? Why, without Brodie being aware of it, is his life absorbing details from Chekhov’s? Is it a literary game, or something more?William Andrew Murray Boyd CBE FRSL (born 7 March 1952) is a Scottish [1] [2] novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. It didn't matter how well you thought you knew someone, he realized. You saw what you wanted to see or you saw what the other person wanted you to see. People were opaque; another person was a mystery. Maybe he was as much a mystery to Lika as she was to him ... Blau, Eleanor (21 May 1983). "New Territory for Explorer in Fiction". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 March 2018.

The book reads like it is written for a movie the way the scenes, the way people dress, what they eat, smoke, etc. are described. Even the architecture of the houses is relayed in much technical detail. It was good to gain some objectivity on a situation that familiarity had made stale. Your life was turned on its head when you thought about it in this way. If the Nicobars seemed strange and their beliefs outlandish, then so were ours, Brodie thought, seen from another perspective.

Boyd met his wife Susan, a former editor and now a screenwriter, while they were both at Glasgow University. He has a house in Chelsea, London and a farmhouse and vineyard (with its own appellation Château Pecachard) in Bergerac in the Dordogne in south-west France. [4] Now, whereof Nerias knew that his son Sedacius was caught in the snares of harlots and indeed had lusted after his brother’s wife, Ruth, and his brother’s daughter, Esther, and showed no remorse, yet Nerias suffered his son to live in his own house, yea, and fed him and his servants also. For Nerias, the Levite, was a righteous man. And the people saw the wisdom of the righteous man and Sedacius was spurned by the Levites, they spake not of him. There was a void, thereof. He was forgotten as a cloud melted by the force of the noonday sun, as smoke dispersed by a breeze. He was shadowless, a nothing, less than a mote of dust.’" Snetiker, Marc (4 January 2013). "Tamsin Greig and John Sessions to Lead William Boyd's Longing in London". Broadway.com . Retrieved 10 March 2018.

Throughout, there are hints of Chekhov – one of his most famous short stories “The Lady with the Little Dog”, the name Lika (in Googling that name, I discovered that Chekhov was also passionate about a singer named Chekhov), the Russian overtones. I suspect there are even more references that I overlooked, having read some of Chekhov years ago.

To me this feels overly simple and simplistic in writing and imaginative vision. There are lots of female breasts (lots) and quite a lot of masturbation (not explicit) all of which render sex as a transaction rather than something more emotional, no matter how many times Brodie swears his undying (ha!) love to Lika: 'Brodie kept a running calculation: from September 1898 to May 1899 - no sexual congress with Lika... masturbation was only the briefest consolation.' A finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination' Guardian Book of the Week