The Romantic

William Boyd

Viking, £20

 

Review by Rosemary Goring

The author’s note, with which William Boyd begins The Romantic, is as much a work of make-believe as what follows. In it he explains why, rather than write a biography of Cashel Greville Ross, a 19th-century soldier, traveller and explorer, he has fictionalised his life. Despite having in his possession the unfinished autobiography Greville Ross left at his death, along with other material which “came into my possession some years ago”, Boyd felt it would create a fuller and more accurate picture if he conveyed this long and tumultuous existence in novel form. To bolster this decision, he quotes Anton Chekhov’s biographer, Donald Rayfield: “All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts.”

Is there any chance Cashel Greville Ross is a real historical figure, of whom only Boyd has found a trace? Far more likely that this is the author treading familiar territory, embedding his made-up protagonist, like Flashman, amid real events and notable names from the past, and embellishing the whole by creating a believable web of cross-references. This is Boyd’s mischievous way, as seen in his faux biography of the artist Nat Tate, and, most pertinently, Any Human Heart.

In the fictional journals of Logan Mountstewart, Boyd traversed the 20th century in the company of a self-obsessed egotist whose reflections on major political happenings was typical of many diarists: great affairs of state get short shrift, whereas the personal is magnified to take centre stage.

There are more than a few points of comparison between The Romantic and Any Human Heart. Like Mountstewart’s, Cashel Greville Ross’s tale spans a century. In the hands of such a consummate storyteller the plaiting of real and imaginary is powerful. It makes you wonder what difference there is between reading about celebrated figures, who are long dead, and someone who is made-up. To what extent is our understanding of history based on scanty knowledge of the key players, who we invest with far greater meaning than perhaps they deserve? And what about the minor players, whose existence was no less meaningful, even if it went unrecorded? Placing a literary chimera in their midst is a playful but provocative way of challenging our perception of the past.

So many intellectual questions swirl around The Romantic you might expect the novel to be hard going. It is anything but. From the outset, when Boyd recounts Cashel’s earliest childhood memory – a man in black leading a black horse, who he thinks is Death coming for him – this is a beguiling, absorbing and impressive piece of work. Written with panache, its vivid factual underpinnings suggest a prodigious grasp of history.

Although born in Scotland in 1799, from infancy Cashel was raised in County Cork by a devoted aunt, after the tragic death of his parents at sea. Or so the story went. When he learned the truth about his parentage, his world was shaken so profoundly it left an emotional fissure that scarred him for the rest of his days. He later reflected that he was “born in a nest of lies”, and the impetuous decision he made as a young man – to join the army – sets the tone for all that is to come: sudden dramatic changes of direction, wrenching him from all he had loved, yet always in the hope of a better future.

That first act of independence brought him to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where he won a medal. Thereafter he signed up with the East India Company’s army, and was present during the Third Kandyan War. Refusing to shoot unarmed villagers, he narrowly escaped a court martial. Travelling across Europe, he became embroiled in the messy and tragic households of Lord Byron and the Shelleys. Not long after this he met the woman who won his heart, and kept it to his dying day. Boyd’s description leaves no doubt about how impressionable and romantic Cashel was: “On seeing her, he felt the authentic body-disturbance of lungs and viscera, the attendant lightness of head, the genital tightening and quiver of acute sensual recognition.” It’s not the most elegant sentence, but it makes its point.

The feeling was reciprocated, but the Countess Raphaella was married, and it took only a malicious intervention for Cashel to flee, in torment. It’s an act he never ceased to regret, but it makes for page-turning drama, as his fortunes rose and fell precipitously in its wake.

Cashel is engaged in so many of the defining spheres of a colonising imperial era that in less skilled hands his trajectory might feel far-fetched. There’s no risk of that with Boyd, however, who turns the tale so adeptly that it feels like the most natural thing in the world when Cashel emigrates to America, to become a farmer.

By this point, he has lived only half his life, and a great deal more follows. With a smattering of footnotes, which heighten the sense of a story pinned to truth, Boyd uses his protagonist to guide readers through the 19th century, from Georgian elegance and brutality and continental upheaval, to the zenith of industrialisation and expeditionary empire.

While he was a man of action, and only rarely succumbed to introspection, Cashel learned to navigate life by listening to his heart. Here there’s another authorial echo. The title of Mountstewart’s journals was taken from Henry James’s injunction: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” It is as if Boyd wants to challenge that dictum, allowing readers into his character’s deepest thoughts and hopes.

Not least of these was his growing awareness, in old age, of the slipperiness of the past: “More and more he came to see memory as elusive and tricky – like imagination – and it was surprisingly malleable and transforming, as if it wanted to be pleasing rather than accurate, like a fawning courtier to its master the autobiographer … he found that he was beginning to mistrust his memory – not a helpful state of affairs for a man writing his autobiography.”

Maybe not, but it’s fertile territory for the novelist. As Boyd illuminates a career of extraordinary adventure and reversals, one question from the opening pages hangs over everything: “What do we leave behind us when we die?” To judge from this captivating work, a fictional character’s legacy far outshines what the rest of us can expect.