Love is Blind

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You could say,’ Vere mused, ‘that, looking at it from one angle, you’re having an amazing Russian literary experience. If he had claimed that its protagonist, Brodie Moncur was a real-life consumptive Scottish piano-tuner of genius, working for John Kilbarron, (“the Irish Liszt”), the real-life piano virtuoso to promote Scottish Channon grand pianos around Europe in the late 1890s, it would be easy enough for us all to check whether he was telling porkies. So struck, in fact, that he invents a noun to describe the feeling: impendingment, and then an adverb, impendingmently, to qualify it. Reading a William Boyd novel ensures a view of history, some travel and a somewhat naive main character trying to make sense of the world.

The trouble is, I wasn’t very convinced by Brodie’s passion and found that I was more interested in his piano-tuning than the state of his heart. One couldn’t avoid the fact that it was probably not going to end well for poor old Brodie and his rotten lungs. Interestingly, I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of loving a book more than many others on GR. 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.All those New York art experts at the party who claimed to know his work had been well and truly fooled. 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.

Boyd’s books have included more serious (and more funny) efforts — like “ Any Human Heart” (2003), a vigorous account of a 20th-century life, and the richly nuanced, darkly comic “ An Ice-Cream War” (1983) — as well as slighter, larkier ones like this.In this cross-country tale, William Boyd’s historical composition considers the life and times of a Scottish piano tuner, who finds his existence upended by his extreme love for a married Russian singer.