Love is Blind

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Or perhaps he was just on a tight schedule, as the whole thing seemed hurried and badly in need of further attention. They are pursued in a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, and eventually to India, that leaves the reader anxiously turning the pages, hoping the unlikely hero makes it out alive. At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian.

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. I liked little snippets such as that although Brodie became fluent in French, it was owing to sheer hard work – he never mastered Russian or German, so clearly wasn’t a natural linguist – somehow this minor detail interspersed in the story made him more real. Boyd beautifully paints the settings and the moods they evoke while sending readers on Brodie’s adventurous, troublesome, and transformative journey. Love Is Blind goes down easy, its pleasures are vaguely guilty, and upon setting it down, it swiftly vanishes from the mind .In the Andaman Islands, Brodie finds some peace and some perspective, as he embarks on an etnographic study of the aboriginal tribes from the islands. Like the inner workings of a finely-tuned piano, the harmony of William Boyd’s Love is Blind is the work of true craftsmanship that is sensed more than outwardly observed. When, on the promenade at Nice, he meets a tall Russian doctor with a pointy beard who is suffering from tuberculosis, he has no idea who he is. In Any Human Heart and The New Confessions so rich is his mix of fact and fiction that he almost convinced me he was writing about the life of a real people.

The musical nature of each city shines through but so too does the filth of life around him,the chaos of each city and his account of each place make this somewhat of a fascinating travelogue. I didn’t stop to examine, for example, the real-life murder of Harry Oakes when the Duke of Windsor was governor of the Bahamas in 1943. The period detail is authoritative—you’ll close the book with a cache of unexpected knowledge about the tobacco, the spectacles and the concert pianos of the era—but rarely cumbersome. It’s also an early warning, though, one of the many instances in the novel that express the Boydian idea that the course of a life can change in an instant and everything can be lost in a heartbeat. I can't believe Boyd wasn't even nominated for the 2018 bad sex in fiction award (which gives me some idea of how REALLY bad the others were).The descriptions are delightful, accurate both in their detail and in their relaying of historical events of the time. That entirely fictitious set-up – along with Moncur’s love for Kilbarron’s mistress, Lika Blum, and an ingenious musical subplot – forms the core of the new book. This man-on-the-run tale, which wraps up at one exotic end of the Earth, is strangely ageless and very entertaining. The year is 1894 and the world is on the brink of the twentieth century with its automobiles, telephones, medical breakthroughs, mass world travel etc, but this is is also, still, the age of duals at dawn, tuberculosis and painfully slow means of correspondence.

I’ve often felt that Boyd doesn’t get quite the same levels of adulation as some of his contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Ian MacEwan.Lika and Brodie undertake a 'hidden in plain sight' love affair in Paris that blooms into a dangerous liaison when the small entourage moves to St Petersburg. The ambitious and energetic Brodie is inspired to move the business in innovative and risky new directions, despite obstacles, in his efforts to increase sales when he brings in the talented pianist, John Kilbarron, 'The Irish Liszt'. In the past, he has sometimes been intrigued by larger issues, like the mutability of identity and the helplessness of individuals confronted with — and subsumed by — the great processes of history.