I had a real William Boyd binge last year, and loved every minute of it. So when I happened upon this 1993 novel, I thought it might please me as much as Waiting for Sunrise, Armadillo, and Ordinary Thunderstorms. But I'm sorry to say that it didn't, quite.
OK, so I seem to be in a minority here. The novel won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1993, and the New York Times called it 'a perfect pitch story of love and redemption'. The only real quibble people seem to have had concerns the way the novel is constructed.
The story begins in 1936 Los Angeles, where a young and ambitious architect, Kay Fisher, is being shadowed by a mysterious old man, Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father. Initially extremely sceptical, since she believes she knows exactly who her father was, she is gradually won over to the point where she agrees to join him on a journey to Lisbon, in search of a woman who he has not seen for more than thirty years.
So far so good. I thought this was a really intriguing beginning, and looked forward to hearing more about Kay and her struggles with the new identity Carriscant has imposed on her. But in that I was disappointed. Kay fades out of the picture and more or less the whole of the rest of the novel is concerned with Carriscant's life story. A surgeon in the Philippines in the early 1900s, he has fallen deeply in love with a young married American woman, but their plans to elope are foiled when he is wrongfully convicted of a series of murders. Kay reappears briefly at the end, but that's it for her story.
Now, any objections I have encountered in the reviews focus on this framing device, and there seems to be a general concensus that Boyd should have left it out. Perhaps he should, though my own feeling was that he should have made more of it. This is not to say that Carriscant's story is lacking in interest -- far from it. It's fascinating on many levels -- the great love story itself, of course, which is passionate and sometimes deliberately funny at the same time (the rather ludicrous lengths lovers will go to to snatch time together), the sub-plot of Carriscant's friend Pantaleon's attempts to create a flying machine which will win a great international prize, the mystery of who did commit the murders, the rather disturbingly detailed description of surgical operations as they were performed in the early 1900s, the background of turn of the century Philippines.
Perhaps I would have loved it more if, as several reviewers have suggested, Boyd had left out Kay's story altogether. But clearly he had a reason for putting it in, and I'm asking myself what that could have been. What, really, would the novel have lost if he had just launched straight into Carriscant's story? The answer, I suppose, must be in a return to the New York Times comment -- a perfect-pitch story of love and redemption. Of course that relates to Carriscant's story, but Kay, too, goes through an important process, though we only see this briefly. The last passage of the novel shows this clearly:
The purple livid mass of the thunderclouds seemed to dominate the overarching sky, but still the sun shone on our faces as the charged light thickened and changed color around us. My finger traced a track through the cold beaded moisture on the sweating bottle; the little steamer had almost reached the quay at Alfama; the sound of traffic and voices rose faintly from the busy streets below us, and I smelt the musky bouquet of the wine as I brought the glass to my lips and drank deep.
So what makes the difference – here and now – on this terrace on this eloquent blue afternoon, as we sit caught between perpetuities of sun and rain, held in this particular moment? I look over at Salvador Carriscant, who is smiling at me, his old broad face radiant with his tremendous good fortune, and I know the answer.
I think I've talked myself into liking the novel better than I thought I did. I certainly won't be giving up on William Boyd -- I think a re-read of The New Confessions, or Nat Tate: An American Artist might be on the cards, as I'm not particularly attracted to his James Bond novel Solo. Maybe I'm wrong, though -- perhaps I should give it a go?
