Life as a game of Bagatelle

Supposedly, out of a cache of assorted papers and oddments, William Boyd has created a masterful memoir of a man born into ambiguity, who lived several lives under assumed names and died unrecognised in a station waiting room.

Cashel Greville Ross was living with his aunt in Ireland, until he was about nine at which time he moved to Oxford with a different name, and his ‘aunt’ became his mother. So began a life that was as much a game of bagatelle as the game itself.

A small ball flicked into an arena with obstacles and safe havens, the ball trickles randomly down the board until it ends up in a safe haven, or runs to the bottom only to be flicked up again. This amply describes the life that is narrated in The Romantic.

On discovering his actual relationship with Aunt Eliza and her husband Ross, Cashel runs away and joins the army as a drummer. Eventually ending up at the Battle of Waterloo and from there his real adventures begin, taking him variously to India, to Europe, to America and all places and all escapades in between. From Waterloo, his adventures take him to the Third Kandy War, in Europe he meets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron; in America he has marital adventures and goes into brewing with his life long companion, Ignaz Vlac; in Africa he encounters Richard Burton and John Speke and so on and so on. He meets the love of his life in Ravenna and is tricked into a false position, something he regrets ever after.

A mesmerising, enchanting and peripatetic life. It reminded me forcibly of a much older novel written in the 1930s, Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen

All the world a stage

I find myself very perplexed by the novels of William Boyd. He veers from improbably perfect (Brazzaville Beach, Any Human Heart et al) to impossibly bad (Restless, too painful to list others) and all stations in between. His latest novel, Trio, has had slightly mixed reviews and I would endorse the warmer ones, but this is not his most compelling book.

[How I hate the stickers! I am delighted to have a signed copy but wonder how many there are out there. Has WB sat and signed 1000 or 100? It does reduce the currency rather, if that matters. Gone are the days when the only way to get a signed copy was to queue at a book signing.]

Trio is about the making of a film with the improbable working title of Emily Bracegirdle and the ladder to heaven. Ann Viklund, an American star is the lead, with Troy as her boyfriend, with whom she quarrels and makes up in various locations in Brighton and specifically on Beachy Head. Off the set, Ann and Troy are having a glorious, but secret, relationship; involving a lot of wine and sex, while she is also swallowing downers and uppers as if they were Smarties.

The year is 1968, a hot English summer; student riots and violence in Paris; assassinations in America and the war in Vietnam – why wouldn’t you make a silly, trite romantic movie?

Her producer, Talbot Kydd is married with children, but is a closet gay man with a second hidden life. His right hand man is called Joe and his partner in YSK Film Ltd, who is in the process of defrauding him is, Yorgos Samsa .

Reggie Tipton, or Rodrigo as he insists of being called, is the film director. He is married to a novelist with acute writers’ block called Elfrida Wing and is also having an affair with a scriptwriter who is working on Emily Bracegirdle to finesse the ending.

All of them have secret lives and the thrust of this book is encapsulated in two quotations, one from Albert Camus on the opening page:

There is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.

William Boyd also quotes Anton Chekov: “Most people live their real, most interesting lives under the cover of secrecy”.

Whether either of these interesting observations is actually true is a philosophical debate of its own, but for the purposes of this novel it all holds. We have it all: the secrecy, the dissatisfaction with the quotidian, petty betrayals, misunderstandings and the longing for another life, one that works better.

If only it was that simple.

Prognostication – Man Booker Prize 2016

Unusually, I have not been grabbed this year by the one book that must be on the Man Booker List because it is going to be the winner. I was spot on with Luminaries, which did indeed go on to win; right that it was on the list, but not a winner, last year with A Little Life.

My suggested list this year is in alphabetical order because these are the books I would like to see on the long list, but I don’t have an outright winner, several favourites but since they cannot all win I am not picking them out yet. So:

Tahmima Anam – The Bones of Grace, this is a lovely ending to a trilogy that has been a long time in the making, but it stands alone so there is no downside (except the Reader’s loss) in not having read the first two.

Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time, a marvellous fictional account of the making of a piece of music, Shostakovich struggles with his piece at the same time as his struggles with the State become more fraught and perilous every minute, the grab bag is packed and outside the door…

William Boyd – Sweet Caress, this is Mr Boyd back on the form of his life, I do hope the judges see it this way…

Chris Cleave – Everyone Brave is Forgiven, war books are seldom fashionable choices for the Man Booker, but this may change, I have put more than one on my list, this is a masterpiece.

Robert Edric – Field Service, I think Robert Edric is a sadly overlooked author, I have loved pretty much every book he has written, but it is only when he departs from world war that he gets a look in, which is a pity since it is about war and its aftermath that he writes so well. Historical novels used not to be considered and look where they are now, a double winner, so maybe his time has come.

Georgina Harding – The Gun Room, a more modern war but seen through a lens, another great piece of imagination and empathy.

Thomas Keneally – Napoleon’s Last Island, a beautiful and unusual look at one of Europe’s great men in his last days, seen through the eyes of a young girl, Betsy Balcombe. Keneally hit upon this tale because of its Australian connections, and he has made it leap from the page.

Andrew Miller – The Crossing, this deals with the interior nature of suffering and grief in a most unusual tale and is all the more compelling for that.

CE Morgan – The Sports of Kings, it is very hard to classify this amazing book, her second novel. Nearer to Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley (also an American) than anything else I have read, but it is so much more than a novel about breeding race horses.

Maggie O’Farrell – This Must be the Place, this I am most confident will be included like the Julian Barnes and the Sarah Perry it seems to be on everyone’s list, it is a sweeping story that crosses continents and times with vigour and intelligence, not to mention beautiful prose.

Sarah Perry – The Essex Serpent, another second novel which I think is required reading. Her first, After Me Comes the Flood won a lots of prizes and was greatly admired, there is no reason why this should not do the same.

Frances Spufford – Golden Hill, I haven’t seem this on anyone else’s list, maybe because it is something of a spoof of an eighteenth century novel in the manner of a Richardson or Swift, it is marvellously funny and paints a very vivid portrait of a well known and much loved city in its infancy, a sheer delight.

Graham Swift – Mothering Sunday, a short, plangent and jewel-like love story set between the two world wars, truly a gem.

Any or all of these might be missed out, this is merely my selection from the books I have read, there are others yet to reach the bookshops that the judges have seen and they will certainly have as much of a chance as any of these; there are no debut novels here either, so at least one or two of these must be displaced by a new voice, one which I may not have heard.

Any or all of these are worth trying, even if they are not on the Man Booker Longlist.

Through a glass darkly

Recently there have been two novels published about photographers, one of them shamelessly echoing one of the more famous war photo journalists of today: Don McCullin while the other novel actually mentions Robert Capa in relation to her own war photograph of a soldier being shot.  Sweet Caress contains a simply exquisite account of the whys and wherefores…where does the fascination begin, why does it continue?

In this novel, Sweet Caress, I am happy to say that William Boyd is back on form. If you have been put off his writing by his last two or three novels (especially Restless and Waiting for Sunrise), or if you only began to read his books recently, take heart – these latest were an aberration. No, that is too harsh for I am sure some people liked them. But with Sweet Caress we are back in the territory of the earlier works, most specifically Any Human Heart.

One of the little biographical details about William Boyd, which make him so fascinating, is that he is a collector of ‘found’ photographs. He collects them from any source – throwaways that someone has discarded for who knows what reason. Mr Boyd will make them live again – differently.

In Sweet Caress, the protagonist, Amory Clay has risen out of a photograph that someone found in a bus shelter and sent to Mr Boyd.  Oh happy day! The photo is of a young girl frolicking in a bathing suit in a  lake – if that sounds rather 1930s-speak, it is deliberate. The unknown woman now has a new identity and new career.

Her birthday in 1908 was obfuscated by The Times announcement that Beverley and Wilfreda Clay had a son named Amory. Was this an error by her father or a sly dig at her mother for producing an offspring of the wrong sex – who knows, but Amory remains somehow unsexed by this for the rest of her life.

Having been given, at a young age, a Kodak Brownie by ‘uncle’ Greville the child is seldom without the camera, looking at life through a lens. An early photograph shows a scene of adult elegance circa 1923, women in long white dresses and large hats at some social gathering.

The whole novel is printed with these photographs that are inserted between paragraphs of text, all of them found…Amory goes from an apprenticeship with Greville taking society portraits, then branching, rather shockingly, out on her own she finds society not quite ready for her rather more truthful portraits and so journals and papers stop taking her work.

Amory is looking back at her life, picking through a large box of photos and remembering it all. Inevitably at one point she ends up in Vietnam, probably the most widely photographed modern war of its time…which segues neatly into the other photographer novel.

The opening page reads:

It is the eyes that make the picture great. The soldier’s eyes look out directly from the page. They look out and through – or perhaps they are not looking at all but seeing only what they have seen already, images that are imprinted on the retina and on the memory so strongly that they cannot be supplanted by whatever is before them now…

The Gun Room is the third novel by Georgina Harding. The photographer in this novel is most definitely a man  – Jonathan. We find him first photographing in Vietnam, shocking and telling pictures of a raid on a Vietnamese village, and a photograph he took of a soldier looking blankly out at the camera. Although eventually these photos get published, Jonathan is still running away from a distant memory, and he ends up in Japan. On the page we are slightly in Lost in Translation territory, this is not a coincidence – Jonathan recognises it himself, but while he is there another coincidence occurs upon which pivots the whole novel.

Full of moral ambiguity, memory and responsibility this novel asks where does the photographer fit into the modern age? At what point does taking a photograph swing from exposing a hidden truth to wrecking a man’s life? The nameless, shocked soldier has an identity, though Jonathan did not wait to find out…but that soldier survived the conflict and had to live with the consequences, as Jonathan will one day discover.

I think it is something we will all have to confront sooner or later, especially the young. There was a fatal accident recently at the end of the road where I live, the main road is a busy bus route and the accident caused three buses to stop. The passengers were disembarked because, obviously, the buses could not progress. More than a few raised their mobile phones to photograph the scene, a fatal crash! Why would you want that on you phone? On another occasion I was part of a mass emergency exodus from the British Museum, thousands of people were leaving the building – it was a sight to behold! Orderly, controlled but urgent – and people were photographing it?!

In an interview recently, Don McCullin was asked if he knew what happened to the soldier he photographed in the Vietnam conflict, a photograph that quite literally became iconic. He didn’t know.

Interestingly, a photographer makes a peripheral appearance in another novel I read recently which I intend to post about later. He is Colonel Ashley-Norton. He had been a photographer at Bergen-Belsen – he describes arriving at the camp down an avenue of flowering cherry trees and smelling the sickening stench before actually seeing the indescribable horror that waited for them.

‘The thing was, Herr Perle, if I hadn’t had the blasted camera and the heavy pack of film on my back, I could have dome more to help people.  But I was instructed never to let any of this “equipment” be separated from my body, and this was an order I had to follow. You see why I hated it so? I felt that camera and that bag of film were dragging me down into the earth. We had feeding teams and delousing teams, and chaps sorting and washing clothing, and I could have helped with some of that. Not with the medical stuff perhaps, because I had no training.  But I could have been of some bloody use, couldn’t I, instead of taking bloody pictures?’

This comes from the new novel by Rose Tremain called The Gustav Sonata. More of that later, but it is wonderful so don’t wait for my comment – get a copy.