During a recent episode of Between the Covers, the BBC Two book club programme presented by Sara Cox, one of the novels considered was from William Boyd’s extensive back catalogue. Any Human Heart, published in 2002, is a 500-page epic that traces the life and times of a roaming Englishman, Logan Mountstuart, throughout the tumultuous events of the 20th century.
Collective excitement greeted its discussion on the show, which indicated not only just how beloved Boyd’s ninth novel continues to be, but perhaps also partly explains why this latest Boyd-related publication, The Mirror and the Road – Conversations with William Boyd, exists at all: here is a novelist held in high regard, let us indulge him.
It is nevertheless a curious thing: a 330-page Q&A conducted by Alistair Owen, writer and superfan, who drills down into Boyd’s nuts-and-bolts process through 17 novels, five short story collections, 12 films, five television series and three stage plays.
This means it’s fundamentally not a biography and so, while we learn that the 71-year-old writer was born in Scotland and has lived in Africa, America, France and England, we glean precious little else: he has a wife called Susan; he never learnt to drive. Attention is instead directed to whether he writes his books in the first person or the third and in which tense.
If this makes it all sound like an unnecessary artefact for even the most ardent of his readers, then, well, yes it is – but it’s also a genuinely fascinating insight into the creative process. Anyone who ever wondered what makes a successful novelist tick will find the answer here.
Boyd has long made the writing life seem an enviable one. For many years, his author photograph featured him with a leather satchel slung across one shoulder, as if this were all he needed for yet more globetrotting adventures while researching novels like the Booker shortlisted An Ice-Cream War (1982), Stars and Bars (1984) and Sweet Caress (2015). Though he confesses to doing the majority of his writing “between lunchtime and cocktail hour”, he’s wildly productive, another book or another film script forever on the go.
He’s always known precisely what he was doing, too. When, early on, his then-agent suggested he rewrite his 1981 novel A Good Man in Africa, he quickly discounted the advice. “All intelligent suggestions gratefully received,” he tells Owen, “but if it isn’t particularly intelligent I’ll ignore it.”
And though war, death and tragedy feature in much of his work, especially his four “whole life” novels, of which Any Human Heart is the benchmark, he considers himself fundamentally a comic writer: “I see the world in all its cruelty and injustice through an idiosyncratic comic lens.” Elsewhere, of his enduring masterpiece, he says: “As an author, you just thank your lucky stars that something you wrote resonates.”
Towards the end, he confesses that, now in his seventies, he occasionally worries he’ll experience the same fate as so many other aging novelists – being dismissed as “male, pale and stale” – but this seems unlikely.
Boyd has never fallen out of fashion because he remains such a faithfully entertaining writer. And in this engrossing book he emerges as engaging an interviewee as he is a literary powerhouse.