The Romantic: William Boyd

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I think the only time Cashel makes the running is in affairs of the heart and the name of the book is apt. He is a true romantic. From affairs of the heart to wanting to be a success at anything, Cashel Ross finds himself generally outplayed, outwitted and taken advantage of at every turn.

Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diaries that she meant to write about death, but “life came breaking in as usual”. In The Romantic, as in all of Boyd’s best books, life is always breaking in. The sentences – even the death sentences – thrum with life: its seemingly irreversible errors, decisions and indignities. There is a moment in this novel where the protagonist reads his own obituary – then cheerfully moves on. Later in the book, a “simple” headstone will be etched with the wrong name. Life stumbles onward. The mistakes are many. But the reading, and the writing, never stop. The fictional biography of Cashel Greville Ross takes us from his beginnings as an orphan living with his aunt in rural Ireland through the many adventures and loves in his life.

Ross is a headstrong and an impulsive character, so his reaction to a situation or an idea is to rush into action. Often this means that his excitement or simply following his gut-feel can end up pushing him in some unpredictable directions. Sometimes this works in his favour but it’s a trait that also causes him much regret and angst throughout his life. A rover by nature, he travels to mainland Europe, Asia, Africa and America as his various schemes and his travails play out. Travel and communications being what they were in the 19th Century it could take him months to reach a destination or even to get a message to someone in another continent. In consequence, his life is complicated, with a tendency for loose ends to be created. London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatr

The Romantic is certainly one of those. I absolutely adored this story and it goes up there as one of my books of the year. On Brazzaville Beach, on the edge of Africa, Hope Clearwater examines the complex circumstances that brought her there. Sifting the details for evidence of her own innocence or guilt, she tells her engrossing story with a blunt and beguiling honesty that not only intrigues and disturbs but is also completely enthralling. This was a wonderfully crafted cradle to grave story of Cashel Greville Ross. Written as a fictional biography Boyd weaves in true historical events and people giving us a insightful sweep into 19th century life spanning many countries and continents. I enjoyed reading about Ross as a character and all of his adventures and relationships. A great immersive story. A panoramic story, at its heart the hopeless, impetuous romantic that is Cashel Greville Ross. William Boyd is a superb story teller. The conceit of the tale is that he is merely reworking the surviving notes, letters and mementoes of Ross into a fictionalised biography. Footnotes enhance the joke. I especially enjoyed finding out where in the British Museum could be found the Lion of Glymphonos, a particularly impressive piece of looted Greek statuary. Cashel is a wonderful creation, Don Quixote to Ignatz’ Sancho Panza and Raphaella’s Dulcinea. Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity. The sense of Cashel hopping from episode to episode as dictated by the demands of history but unrestrained by the trammels of the standard confected plot feels wonderfully refreshing – bittiness becomes a virtue. As usual, Boyd also fills in some historical lacunae with teasing ingenuity, providing, for example, a new explanation for the mysterious death of the explorer John Hanning Speke (oh yes, I forgot to mention Cashel finds time to join an expedition to discover the source of the Nile).

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Most of all, this romantic will fall head over heels for a glamorous Contessa named Raphaella, who will never stray far from his mind. Although to this reader, Raphaella came across as vainglorious, manipulative and materialistic as well as (of course) beautiful, this is, after all the romantic era, and Cashel is the ultimate romantic. Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.

Later there is a retread of the famous scene in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), in which the protagonist misses, to ironic effect, the real action at the battle of Waterloo. Boyd’s protagonist, Cashel Greville Ross, wanders off from his regiment in search of a diarrhoea-afflicted friend and has a bloody, largely accidental scuffle with some French lancers. Meanwhile, offstage, Bonaparte’s army is rousted. William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) – adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart – and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. His new book, The Romantic, is set in the 19th century and presents itself as a biographical fiction inspired by the personal papers of one Cashel Greville Ross, a Scots-born Irishman who fought at Waterloo, met Shelley, smuggled Greek antiquities and set out in search of the source of the Nile, among other adventures. Boyd, whom Sebastian Faulks has called “the finest storyteller of his generation”, grew up in Ghana and Nigeria and lives in London and the Dordogne, from where he spoke over Zoom. Over his long and illustrious career, William Boyd has made a name for himself as a peerless storyteller, whose themes have stretched from the comic to crime to spy thrillers. But the 70-year-old is mostly – and rightly – lauded for those in which he recounts the story of an imagined historical life from first breath to last. An Ice-Cream War is William Boyd’s sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of conflict, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century. Cashel Greville Ross, the hero of William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic, is a man who does plenty of wandering and whose path through life changes direction many times. Born in Ireland in 1799, he lives through some of the major events of the 19th century and becomes a soldier, a writer, a farmer and an explorer – though not all at the same time. He is present on the battlefield of Waterloo, befriends Byron and Shelley in Pisa and travels through Africa in search of the source of the Nile. It’s a great achievement by Boyd to produce this book and it’s thoroughly enjoyable with flashes of humour, warmth and fascinating insights into some interesting real- life characters like Byron and Richard Burton from the Nineteenth century. He is to become a commissioned army officer in the East India Company in Madras, but taking a moral stand in Ceylon has him return to explore Europe, and to write about his travels. In Pisa and Lerici, he meets and gets to know Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord 'Albe' Byron and Claire Clairemont, becoming privy to the tangle of intrigue and rivalries within the group. He encounters the love of his life in Ravenna, unavailable, a passionate love which will endure, despite barely seeing each other through the years once he leaves Italy. Whilst becoming a successful author, he is swindled by his publisher, which lands him in debtor's prison, only to embark on a new life in America on release, then go on a expedition to find the source of the Nile, there he meets Richard Burton. He is to get caught up in a Greek antiquities scandal as the Nicaraguan Consul in Trieste, this puts hims in such danger that he goes in hiding in Venice. Boyd spent eight years in academia, during which time his first film, Good and Bad at Games, was made. When he was offered a college lecturership, which would mean spending more time teaching, he was forced to choose between teaching and writing.

He is not a 19th-century person but a 21st-century person, affably and occasionally judgmentally consorting with some 19th-century cosplayers. Beyond this he is a cipher Ross fights at the Battle of Waterloo and explores the world, meeting Byron and Shelley, brewing German beer in America and attempting to discover the source of the Nile. When it comes to his description of love stories, and dalliances, Boyd is rather old fashioned. I did like Cashel’s definition of love “to care more about the person you loved than you did about yourself” (444). The prose is occasionally original and alert, as in the phrase “the lane gleamed with thin tainted puddles in its rutted surface”, where “tainted” is both rhythmically gorgeous and precisely unexpected. But more often, we’re looking at a serious case of prose-bloat. Cashel, as a child, dreams of education, which “might allow him a chance to move out of the never-ending poverty that the cottiers seemed destined to live in forever”. Never-ending and forever: hmm. Sentences are forever pausing to tell us that “Cashel thought” or “Cashel noticed”, as if novelists had not, even in the 19th century, devised more elegant methods of presenting the workings of perception and consciousness. We made our way up to the piano nobile where LB greeted us. He is quite short and, not to put too fine a point on it, very plump. His face is plump, his hands are plump, his fingers are plump. Hair receding, also. He introduced us to his mistress, Contessa Guiccioli, very young, 18–20, I’d say, who matches her paramour in plumpness but, however, is very beautiful with it, speaking hardly a word of English but, looking at her very ample figure, let’s say its noticeable prominences, it is not her anglophony that explains her attraction to LB, I would venture.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. I suspect that if you ask a type of reader to align William Boyd with another writer of his generation the name Sebastian Faulks will come up. Faulks is quoted on the book cover endorsing The Romantic. I think there’s quite a similarity in the two writers’ output. Boyd, like Faulks, is strongest in his depiction of the horrors and depravity of war, and the more bloody the hand to hand combat, the more striking the description. An early Boyd novel is An ice Cream War set in World War One, in Africa. Boyd doesn’t glamorise bloodshed, and in the Romantic the fate of Cashel’s comrade Croker will stay with me. Hand to hand fighting, as depicted in the Battle of Waterloo, was not fun. This might sound like a bad thing but he always takes his beatings with grace and finds another scheme to make his name. He's extremely adaptable, personable, attractive and a gentleman to boot.