Love is Blind

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He seems to get entangled with and taken advantage of by unpleasant people with some regularity – although he sees through them, his desire to earn money and not give in seems to lead him to a sort of stasis. He adapted Evelyn Waugh's Scoop for television (1988) and also Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (2001). He made it onto the Booker shortlist once with An Ice-Cream War, and – to be honest – should have won it.

Boyd, a self-confessed “Chekhov obsessive”, doesn’t tell us that Chekhov, like Brodie, had a passionate relationship with a blondwould-be opera singer whose name happened to be Lika.He settles on John Kilbarron — “a bit passé, perhaps, but one of the real old-school klaviertigers 10 or 20 years ago.

At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. After reading a less than satisfactory novel, I wanted something with guaranteed quality, so I turned to a William Boyd book I’d had on my Kindle for ages. Promoted to a post at the new Paris showroom, Brodie suggests that the company widen its name recognition by giving an instrument to a famous concert pianist, which is how he comes to meet John Kilbarron, 'the Irish Liszt,' and his lovely Russian girlfriend, Lika. Moncur’s escape from the manse, to take on a position at his employer’s Parisian showroom, leads to a keenly observed saga revolving around both his infatuation with Lika and his troubled relationship with her tempestuous pianist lover, “the Irish Liszt”, John Kilbarron, and his malevolent brother, Malachi. Born in Ghana and spending his early life in Nigeria, William Boyd is known around the world for his prize winning books.From the beginning of the book – concerned as it is with the relationship between life and art, truth and performance – there are hints that Chekhov is going to be important. His novels and stories have been published around the world and have been translated into over thirty languages. Chekhov, though unnamed, appears in only half a dozen pages of Love is Blind, yet his spirit hovers over nearly all of it. After 14 novels and many literary prizes, Boyd’s storytelling abilities are beyond dispute and are clearly on display in this latest tale that follows its hero, Brodie Moncur, on a restless journey from Scotland to Europe and beyond as the 19th century shades into the 20th . In his new novel, William Boyd has a veteran pianist explain the way a piece of music draws a listener’s tears: Just when you think you know where the harmony is going to go, it remains tantalizingly unresolved.

A collection of his non-fiction writings, 1978-2004, entitled Bamboo, was published in October 2005. For example, it made perfect sense to me that Brodie came to be framed for embezzlement and then subsequently fired from the Channon Piano firm, despite the fact that clearly he was innocent! I’ve often felt that Boyd doesn’t get quite the same levels of adulation as some of his contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Ian MacEwan. We follow Brodie from 1888, when he is eighteen, to 1906, in his mid-thirties, and from Edinburgh to Paris to Geneva to Nice to St. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.In a time of strict expectations in social life, Boyd highlights this aspect well in the actions of his character set. Probably not, but when you consider reported incidences of stalking, obsessive jealousy and refusal to accept a former lover has moved on, perhaps it is less unusual than one thinks. I don’t think of him as either gangling or clumsy, and he’s clearly very bright and good at organising things and managing people. It’s a finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination.

The apparent love between them seemed false and cumbersome, and it was always about when Brodie could get his next sex session. It’s something of a paradox that this “play”, with its vision of life as a chaotic kind of lottery, arrives in such an assiduously organised package as Love Is Blind. I've now read a dozen or so of his books and I'm blown away by his inventiveness, the diversity of his stories and above all the way in which, in his best work, he invites the reader to become a part of the story – to become, in fact, the lead character and to experience their life as if it were your own.It's at this point that John Kilbarron (the ‘Irish Listz’) enters the picture… together with his lover, Lika. His wife is editor-at-large of Harper's Bazaar magazine, and they currently spend about thirty to forty days a year in the US.