This book began very readably and I enjoyed the schooldays section of Logan’s life. Boyd captures the know it all nature of late youth, the burning desire to enter the adult world and be serious and the way naive new ideas and values are taken up with fervour, tried on and then discarded for something else. There are some funny incidents too during this era.
As we follow young Logan Mountstuart up to Oxford the portrait remains intriguing. However, as far as I remember, it is also during our hero’s university days that the author introduces the practice of name dropping. It is a very boring and a cheap, pretentious trick. The Garsington Manor incident, if not the first, is certainly the most gratuitous. It felt strange to be reading caricatures of famous people, wheeled in to perform their party trick, in the midst of what had been a fairly engaging story. It felt like the author didn’t think his characters were sufficiently interesting, which they were, or couldn’t be bothered to think of more material for them so instead resorted to the introduction of a bizarre array of cultural celebrities replete with hackneyed cameos. Sadly, it continued throughout the book. I felt it added nothing and sullied the whole story with a kind of autograph hunting, celebrity obsessed, gossip column ambience.
The character of Logan also suffers from a dip in quality around this time too. While at university he starts fucking his best friend’s girlfriend. Things continue in this vein when he begins an affair immediately after his wife has given birth and continues to live a dual life with his mistress in London until he is discovered. All this gives me the impression that Logan is a deeply selfish and extraordinarily self-satisfied. There’s plenty of evidence for this later on in the book. The worst is perhaps totally ignoring his son from his first marriage after his divorce for about a decade! Against this, he is faithful to his former mistress, Freya, and seems dedicated to her and his daughter until they are both tragically killed in the war. Just because he is pretty detestable individual doesn’t necessarily make Logan a bad character. But coupled with the thin stories and name dropping, it began to grate a bit. His career also seems to be conveniently designed for name dropping because he is an author in London 30s and then an art dealer in NY in the 60s allowing the author to mention even more famous people. If you chuck in Logan’s time as a spy, recruited by Ian Fleming of course, during the war then you can begin to develop some sense for the overblown nature of the narrative. Logan’s war was surprisingly forgettable given it ostensibly contains so much action. This is perhaps less surprising when I consider that the author would have had no direct experience of this environment, making it much harder for him to render it effectively to the reader. From reading his brief biography, it is clear he has first hand experience of minor British public schools and Oxford University and these sections are correspondingly more vivid. The African section of Logan’s life wasn’t especially good in spite of the author’s upbringing in Ghana. Equally, the scenes of old age are well drawn and he was only 50 when wrote them although it is conceivable he had experiences with more elderly family members or friends. It seems that this theory has its limitations but in general I felt he is stronger on familiar ground and seeks to include as much of it as possible.
There were some good bits as the book progressed. There was some excellent criticism of boring toffs (mainly his first wife’s family) but it lacked teeth coming from someone as unprincipled as Logan. His later years in London were, on the whole, more engaging and had some vivid scenes of Logan’s own, geriatric Down and Out in Paris and London style experiences. I kept wondering how he had managed to squander so much of his money. Then I began to wonder why he didn’t just sell his flat and live somewhere cheaper and stop eating dog food. In this sense, I didn’t think there was a lot of narrative logic or justification for this era of his life but it was better than the New York years and the interminable name-dropping! Mountstuart’s retirement in France is decently drawn, especially the landscape and light, but this section also contains a half baked story about a war criminal’s daughter returning to the region. The section where Mountstuart nurses his dying friend Gloria is also poignant.
Two other minor gripes I had with the book were that there were too many peripheral characters and it was hard to keep track of them when they only pop up once every hundred pages. His first cousin who he kisses as a teenager and then appears about three times in the next 70 years is a good example. There will be plenty more that I can’t even remember now. The second is that, although Logan speaks Spanish, there is barely a word of it and instead book is full of untranslated French, which is a pet hate of mine! In a Victorian novel I might forgive the assumption of French knowledge but not in a book from 2002. I can’t comprehend this decision and it really annoys me! The Spanish is translated though, which is at least something!
On the whole I found this a pretty superficial book. It was easy to read but left little lasting impression on me. The narrative felt a bit disjointed and lots of the material was thin. That having been said, there were certainly some good sections and it was not badly written in terms of style. I suspect my extreme hatred of the celebrity cameo tipped my bias against this book! It is definitely a fairly disparate collection of material, too much so in my opinion, but it could be argued accurately mimics some lives. However, I found I didn’t like or empathise with the main character and thought the narrative was patchy and inexpertly assembled.
