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Summary
Summary
Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic .
From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century.
'Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game' Guardian
'There are few reading pleasures as great as giving in to a William Boyd novel' Sunday Times
'One of our best contemporary storytellers' Spectator
'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks
Author Notes
William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. Any Human Heart was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a TV series with Channel 4. In 2005, Boyd was awarded the CBE. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France.
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
At the beginning of The Romantic, William Boyd asks: "What do we leave behind us when we die?" Posterity - and legacy - are questions that have preoccupied him for decades. There are few writers today as obsessed by the biographical - or faux-biographical - form. Over the course of his career, Boyd has specialised in examining the fictitious lives of his characters with wit and authority. He has now returned to life writing with this account of Cashel Greville Ross, the self-described "bastard son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocrat and a Scottish governess". We follow Ross as he variously assumes the personae of writer, adventurer, soldier, brewer and general observer of the 19th century. Told in the third person, rather than the first person of Boyd's other biographical novels, The Romantic blends wryly fictionalised real-life events and characters with a creative description of the social, political and romantic upheavals within its protagonist's life. There is, naturally, an all-consuming love affair, along with a suitably colourful supporting cast of rogues, swindlers, villains and even the odd honest man. For a less talented writer, this approach would run the risk of diminishing returns. Logan Mountstuart (of Boyd's Any Human Heart), Ross and The New Confessions's John James Todd are themselves almost Zelig-like figures, who are defined more by their environment and encounters than their individual traits. Yet this does not mean that the protagonist of The Romantic is boring. On the contrary, Boyd stuffs his life story so full of incident and adventure that it verges on the absurd. The narrative stretches from the early 19th century to an epilogue in 1882, includes guest appearances from everyone from Lord Byron to Sir Richard Burton and encompasses locations that include Ireland, Oxford, Africa, America, Venice, India and the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. This is a rambunctious, swashbuckling tale, told with panache by a master storyteller. Boyd is sufficiently confident in his material to portray historical incidents and characters with casual relish; the battle of Waterloo, for instance, is seen largely from the perspective of a dysentery-beset drummer. This marriage between the intimate and the epic continually produces striking vignettes that illuminate the wider narrative. When Ross finds himself on the Italian beach where Shelley's body is being burned, Boyd vividly describes the "curious, putrefying, blue-grey hue" of what remains of the poet's flesh. The reader can practically smell the rot and salt and smoke. Had any other writer come up with The Romantic, it might be called a magnum opus, but longstanding admirers of Boyd have come to expect, and delight in, his generous, maximalist approach to both storyline and character. So perhaps it is inevitable that his prose, usually so elegant, occasionally tips over into overripe melodrama. It is understandable that Ross, discovering his true paternity, might curse his real mother as "you whore from hell", but few writers could get away with a sentence such as the one that has his protagonist vowing to "ruin Shay Corcoran utterly, rescue [my] daughters from his evil influence, and marry Fannie Broome". Thankfully such excesses are rare. And they do not distract from the addictive readability of The Romantic, the narrative of which follows a simple but enjoyable formula. Ross involves himself in an unlikely escapade; it appears to go well; it turns out exceptionally badly; Ross escapes through some quirk of chance. There is a gleeful attitude in playing fast and loose with history and certain details, such as the unfortunate end of the Nile explorer John Hanning Speke, which could easily have emerged from the pages of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman chronicles. And there's a serious point amid the fun. There's an apt description of memory as "a fawning courtier to its master the autobiographer" and Boyd's delight in exploring the unreliability of recollection permeates the narrative. We are consistently invited to question how far Ross's exploits are "true" and how far they are self-perpetuated creation. Towards the end, his grand inamorata sighs that her life has been "all very boring, compared to [yours]". Those who fall in love with The Romantic may wonder whether their own lives lack adventure. Surrender to this fine novel's spell, though, and it will vicariously supply more than enough thrills for anyone.