Love is Blind

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There is an especially well-observed scene when Moncur finds himself having a solitary and lavish meal in a restaurant (incongruously, a French establishment in Russia), and he muses that “he realised that personal happiness was such a fickle, fragile thing… he should be happy, yet he was unhappy because he couldn’t be with Lika, the woman he loved beyond all reason… but to quit Piter and leave her would only make him more unhappy… he was trapped in a maddening cycle of strange unhappiness”. He made it onto the Booker shortlist once with An Ice-Cream War, and – to be honest – should have won it.

Stay with these precious moments, he told himself as he stood on the bridge over the Seine as the dusky light thickened. After reading a less than satisfactory novel, I wanted something with guaranteed quality, so I turned to a William Boyd book I’d had on my Kindle for ages. All the lose ends are tied up and there seems to be an air of suspense throughout the story, even when Moncur secures what appears to be the dream job of working in the Paris showroom for Channon pianos where the misdemeanours of one of the characters ultimately leads to Moncur being in the employ of the tormented John Kilbarron and his menacing brother. A further complication is the discovery that Brodie is suffering from an incurable disease, the bane of the nineteen century – tuberculosis. Brodie Moncur, a talented piano-tuner in Edinburgh meets someone in Paris and ends up falling in love with her to the point of obsession only to realise that she is the partner of someone else.

I got no real sense of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some fairly graphic descriptions.

In any case, however, there are only flickers of the charm you would want to steadily emanate from such a period production.Love is Blind offers a fictional historical account of the emotion, madness and heartbreak involved when you love someone who is attached to another. This has all the inimitable style and qualities of an epic character driven William Boyd novel, of love, passion, obsession and music within a historical period presaging the great changes in the world at the end of the nineteenth century. On the plus side, there's quite a lot of story here as the tale sweeps from Edinburgh to Paris to St Petersburg and then swoops off to the Andaman Islands.

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. He adapted Evelyn Waugh's Scoop for television (1988) and also Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (2001). Love Is Blind eventually reminded me of a tired revival of one of Franco Zeffirelli’s decades-old, hyper-naturalistic stagings for the Metropolitan Opera: all surface detail, no life. Objectivity and resignation are fine in theory, but this is a love story after all, and, no matter how hard he tries, Brodie Moncur cannot command the yearnings of his heart.

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.

At once an intimate portrait of one man’s life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century. 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. it’s depressing that he [Boyd] thought that classical music would be the perfectly complementary subject matter, as lovably hoary as the narrative style he is pantomiming. It has been a while since I had read anything by William Boyd and I usually find his books to be well written and hugely compelling.It means that he can escape the clutches of his unbearably grotesque, hypocrital and bullying preacher father, Malky. No matter how implausibly exotic – Hemingway, the Duchess of Windsor – he placed them into the story as carefully as an expert fly fisherman, making sure there are no unnatural ripples on the surface. Reading Boyd’s new novel has also involved me looking at YouTube videos of piano tuning (a key plot point, oddly enough) as well as realising, perhaps even more deeply than I have done before, the complexities involved in twisting the historical reality into credible fiction. Yet there is also a sense of mischief and playfulness imbued into its narrative that takes the form of several elaborate homages to other books and stories. 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.