Book Review: "Any Human Heart" by William Boyd

“The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Thérèse inside making me a sandwich au camembert. Munching the knob of a fresh baguette as I wander back from Sainte-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. A huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialing-tone of the crickets at dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and, as I go to sleep, the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow.”

The novel starts off with a prologue where the narrator discusses how he moved from his home to Birmingham, England. Describing the kind of relationship he had with his parents and even how he was named the way he was - this prologue starts his story. But, he explains that everything really begins when he is 17 in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He makes two friends there where they set themselves some challenges including having a Jewish friend convert to Roman Catholicism.

After this, our narrator gets writing on a critically acclaimed biography of Percy Shelley and after some stumbles in his writing career, his mother loses the family fortune in the Great Depression after the Wall Street Market Crash during the 1930s. During the time of the Spanish Civil War, he gets in trouble with women and things turn from bad to worse. After a while, our narrator falls into depression and seeks a release from it in Paris and after all of this, he travels to Nigeria to become a lecturer. And that is just the half of it.

William Boyd introduces us to the narrator, Logan, who was born into some sort of privilege and then, as his family loses it all, he indulges in his main vices of women and alcohol. As he grows up in a world of turbulence, war and depression we see that he is no more than a troubled ordinary man with some extraordinary experiences to speak of. Told in diaries in some of the most heartfelt and descriptive writing you will see of things like the Spanish Civil War and the formation of modern Paris, this book delves deep into the heart of the world at a time where it is not really alright to be anywhere at all.

My favourite part of this book was probably the parts concerning the Great Depression of the 1930s due to the way William Boyd writes about loss and sadness. There is something really depressing, more depressing than just the era, that happens when a family who have done nothing to deserve losing everything they have actually lose everything they have. It is like reading one of those really mournful episodes of an Emile Zola novel or one of those deep contemplations and tests of faith in a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel - you feel as if this is it for your characters and that nothing will ever get any better at all. However, as they are human like the rest of us, they try to find the window of opportunity, the door to something else whatever it might be - even if it leads to vice and disarray, chaos and foreboding - it is still better than the here and now. William Boyd writes the episode perfectly into the larger story, having it push out a ripple effect on to the rest of the novel.

All in all, I thought that this novel was beautiful. There's so many places and eras to discover and the way we are moved throughout the century, we can see glimpses and never the whole thing - this is amazing to me. It proves that there is so much beneath the surface that has yet to be uncovered and yet, we have still been left profoundly moved by what we already know of the narrative.