Any Human Heart
Encyclopedia
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002
novel by William Boyd
, a Scottish writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by the protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the twentieth century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form as a means of exploring how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king.
Boyd, who spent 30 months writing the novel, plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf
in London
, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh
at Oxford
, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce
in Paris
, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway
that spans several years. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on its publication, but has sold well. A television adaptation was made of the screenplay written by Boyd and was first broadcast in 2010.
– 1988) and the hoax biography of an invented artist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960
, in which the character of Logan Mountstuart was first mentioned in 1998. Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, of whom a black-and-white photograph Boyd had found in a French second-hand shop was included. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952". Boyd described him as,
Boyd distinguished journal, biography
, and memoir
as literary forms, different treatments of the same essential subject, the human condition, the change in medium justified his writing again of a whole-life view : "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered."
Boyd, though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford
, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of Any Human Heart took thirty months as he carefully plotted Mountstuart's life to be significant but seem random, a period during which he bought several hundred books. He spent another year and a half writing the book.
, Uruguay
before he moves to England aged seven with his English father and Uruguayan mother. In his final term at school he and two friends set challenges. Logan is to get on to the school's first XV rugby
team, Peter Scabius has to seduce Tess, a local farmer's daughter, and Ben Leeping, a lapsed Jew, has to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mountstuart enters Oxford on an exhibition and leaves with a third in History. Settling in London, he enjoys early success as a writer with: The Mind's Imaginings, a critically successful biography of Shelley
; The Girl Factory, a salacious novel about prostitutes which is poorly reviewed but sells well; and Les Cosmopolites, a respectable book on some obscure French poets
. Mountstuart embarks on a series of amorous encounters: he loses his virginity to Tess, is rejected by Land Forthergill whom he met at Oxford, and marries Lottie, an Earl's daughter. They live together at Thorpe Hall in Norfolk, where Mountstuart, unstimulated by slow country life or his warm but dull wife, becomes idle.
He meets Freya whilst on holiday, and begins an affair with her. Just before he departs for Barcelona
to report on the Spanish Civil War
, Lottie unexpectedly visits and quickly realises another woman lives with him. On his return to England, following an acrimonious divorce, he marries Freya in Chelsea Town Hall. The newly-weds move to a house in Battersea
where Freya gives birth to their daughter, Stella. During The Second World War
Mountstuart is recruited into the Naval Intelligence Division
by Ian Fleming
. He is sent to Portugal to monitor Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson; when they move to the Bahamas, Mountstuart follows, playing golf with the Duke and socialising regularly until the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. Mountstuart suspects the Duke is a conspirator after two hired detectives ask him to incriminate Oakes' son-in-law with false fingerprint evidence. Mountstuart refuses and is called a "Judas
" by Mrs. Simpson. Later in the war, Mountstuart is interned in Switzerland
for two years. After the war's end, he is grieved to discover that Freya, thinking him dead, had re-married and then died, along with Stella, in a V-2 bomb attack.
After the war, Mountstuart's life collapses as he seeks refuge in an alcoholic daze to escape his depression. He buys 10b Turpentine Lane, a small basement flat in Pimlico
. He returns to Paris to finish his existentialist
novella, The Villa by the Lake, staying with his old friend Ben (now a successful gallery owner). After a failed sexual encounter with Ordile, a young French girl working at Ben's gallery, he attempts suicide but is surprised by the girl when she returns an hour later for her Zippo lighter. Ben Leeping offers Mountstuart a job as manager of his new gallery in New York, "Leeping fils". Mountstuart mildly prospers in the art scene of 1960s, meeting artists like de Kooning (whom he admires) and Jackson Pollock
(whom he does not); he also moves in with an American lawyer, Alannah, and her two young daughters. On his return to London, he has an affair with Gloria, Peter Scabius' third wife (Peter has become a successful author of popular novels), as well as Janet, a New York gallery owner. He eventually discovers Alannah having her own affair, and the couple split. He reconciles with his son from his first marriage, Lionel, who has moved to New York to manage a pop group, until Lionel's sudden death. Monday, his girlfriend, moves into Mountstuart's flat; at first friends, they become intimates until her father turns up and Mountstuart discovers – to his horror – that she is sixteen (having told him she was nineteen). His lawyer advises him to leave America to avoid prosecution for statutory rape
.
In the African journal, Mountstuart has become an English lecturer at the University College of Ikiri in Nigeria
, from where he reports on the Biafran War. Mountstuart retires to London on a paltry pension and, now an old man, he is knocked over by a speeding post office van. In hospital he brusquely refuses to turn to religion, swearing his atheism and humanism
to a priest. He recovers but is now completely destitute. To boost his income and publicise the state of hospitals, he joins the Socialist Patients Kollective (SPK) (which turns out to be a cell of the Baader-Meinhof Gang). He becomes the SPK's prize newspaper seller and is sent on a special mission to the continent. The trip ends with a brief interrogation by Special Branch, after which Mountstuart returns to his life of penury in London. With a new appreciation of life, he sells his flat and moves to a small village in the south of France, living in a house bequeathed to him by an old friend. He fits into the village well, introducing himself as an ecrivain who is working on a novel called Octet. As he contemplates his past life after the deaths of Peter and Ben, his old school friends, he muses:
, Boyd confirmed "this thesis that we are an anthology, a composite of many selves" is a theme of the book. While man's fundamental nature remains the same, he moves in and out of happiness, love and good health. Wisdom, as with age, is slowly acquired.
was a fictional memoir, and Nat Tate a spoof biography. In Any Human Heart, Boyd uses the journal form as a fresh angle to pursue the subject from: "I wanted to invent my own exemplary figure who could seem almost as real as the real ones and whose life followed a similar pattern: boarding school, university, Paris in the 20s, the rise of Fascism, war, post-war neglect, disillusion, increasing decrepitude, and so on—a long, varied and rackety life that covered most of the century. Boyd sets Mountstuart's life within its context, tracing the grand arc of events during the 20th century by depiciting Mountstuart as swept along in the flow of history - he fights in World War II, sees the cultural revolution in the 1950s and 60s, and takes advantage of modern mass transit in his extensive travels around the world. Rather than being re-told in hindsight, their importance in context, historical events are seen through the petty lens of every-day living. For example, in an entry from the 1920s, Mountstuart notes "Coffee with Land Fothergill at the Cadena. She was wearing a velvet coat that matched her eyes. We talked a little stiffly about Mussolini and Italy and I was embarrassed to note how much better informed she was than I."
Boyd said he was partially inspired by the generation of English writers who matured between the wars: "I am fascinated by the life and work of that generation of English writers who were born at the beginning of the century and reached maturity by the time of World War II. People like Evelyn Waugh
and Graham Greene
and Anthony Powell
, obviously, but also less well known writers—Henry Green
, Lawrence Durrell
, Cyril Connolly
and William Gerhardie
. The last two in particular lurk closely behind Logan." Both real and imagined characters are blended into this context, where historical personages are typically used to concentrate the historical significance of a novel's plot, Mountstuart's encounters with them are superficial, leaving only an impression of both parties' small-mindedness. John Mullan
found the conceit most effective during the New York journal, where Boyd satirises figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement during the 1950s "whose characters seem almost beyond invention."
through a series of nine journaux intimes, kept by the protagonist from age 17 until shortly before his death at 85. French literary journals, always published posthumously, are often extremely candid accounts, particularly of the author's sexual life. Boyd, himself a francophile, includes allusions to masturbation, prostitution and Mountstuart's three marriages. While Boyd had earlier written work in the form of memoir or biography, a journal is different: ""For a start, it's written without the benefit of hindsight, so there isn't the same feeling you get when you look back and add shape to a life. There are huge chunks missing." The novel's grounding in everyday life and focus on characterisation place it firmly within realism
.
Each journal covers a different period of Mountstuart's life, and they are usually geographically named: The School Journal, London I, etc. Boyd varied the narrator's tone in each to demonstrate changes in Mountstuart's character, in the first London Journal he is, according to Boyd, a "modernist aesthete", becoming a "world-weary cynic" in New York and finding "serene and elegiac serenity" in the final French journal. To support the book's historical themes and documentary premise, there is a feigned editorial apparatus: an index listing real people and their relation to Mountstuart alongside fictional characters, an editor's introduction (by Boyd), an authorial preface (by Mountstuart) and a list of works attributed to Logan Mountstuart. An additional stylistic feature is the anonymous editor, in fact Boyd, who introduces the book and offers explanatory footnotes, cross-references and attempts at dating. Since a journal is written from the perspective of each day, Mountstuart's moods change as events affect him. The form lends itself to "plotlessness", since the author/narrator inevitably cannot see the overall structure of the story. Plot lines which "fizzle and fade" emphasise the theme of multiple selves throughout life. Boyd adds other aspects to the work, such as parenthetical musings that are never answered, to re-enforce the style. His tone of voice gradually changes as he ages, Boyd wanted the style to reflect a major theme i.e. that we change and grow throughout life, "I wanted the literary tone of each journal to reflect this and so the voice subtly changes as you read on: from pretentious school boy to modern young decadent, to bitter realist to drink soaked cynic, to sage and serene octogenarian, and so forth."
, Brooke Allen liked the Mountstuart character: "he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life", thus making an "attractive central character" and Boyd's writing showed "a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism." The Atlantic Monthly selected it as one of the "books of the year".
In The Observer
, Tim Adams complimented the opening sections as "nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student." but criticised the "predictability" of Mountstuart's "walk-on part in literary history" and ultimately the suspension of disbelief
, particularly the Baader-Meinhoff passages, concluding "For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion." Tom Cox, in The Daily Telegraph disagreed, he praised the characterisation, calling Mountstuart "a man whose fragile egotism and loose-fitting story has you frequently forgetting you're reading fiction, and even more frequently forgetting you're reading at all." Giles Foden
, in The Guardian, found the New York art-scene sections weakest, saying they "puncture the realism Boyd has so carefully built up in the rest of the novel." Michiko Kakutani
agreed that Mountstuart's youth was well evoked, but that the description of his retirement and poverty was "as carefully observed and emotionally resonant". While in the early part of the book, "the characters' marionette strings [are] carefully hidden" later Boyd tried to play God, resulting in "an increasingly contrived narrative that begins to strain our credulity."
Boyd, who spends his summer in the south of France, has a large audience in that country and several French journals noted the publication of Any Human Heart.L'express called Boyd a "magician" and Le Devoir also noticed the imagination of his creation, calling it "first of all, an admirable work of forgery". Le Nouvel Observateur
called it "very good Boyd. Perhaps even his magnum opus".
The novel was nominated on the longlist of the Man Booker Prize
in 2002, and on the shortlist of the Dublin Impac Literary Award
in 2004. In 2009, Boyd commented that "[it] didn't get particularly good reviews, yet I've never had so many letters about a novel. It's selling fantastically well seven years on, and we're about to turn it into six hours of telly for Channel 4, so something about that novel gets to readers."
, Matthew Macfadyen
and Jim Broadbent
playing Logan Mountstuart as he ages. It was broadcast from 21 November 2010 to 12 December 2010. The series was rebroadcast in 3 episodes in 2011 in the United States on PBS as part of the Masterpiece Classic program.
2002 in literature
The year 2002 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*March 16: Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested and jailed poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired a newspaper editor following the publication of Musalam's poem The Corrupt on Earth that criticized the state's Islamic...
novel by William Boyd
William Boyd (writer)
William Boyd, CBE is a Scottish novelist and screenwriter.-Biography:Of Scottish descent, Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria, in Africa...
, a Scottish writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by the protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the twentieth century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form as a means of exploring how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king.
Boyd, who spent 30 months writing the novel, plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
at Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
that spans several years. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on its publication, but has sold well. A television adaptation was made of the screenplay written by Boyd and was first broadcast in 2010.
Composition
Boyd had previously written a novel as a memoir (The New ConfessionsThe New Confessions
The New Confessions is a novel of the Scottish writer William Boyd. The book follows the life of John James Todd from his birth in Edinburgh up to his final exile on a Mediterranean island, having fled the USA from fear of being implicated in a murder...
– 1988) and the hoax biography of an invented artist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960
Nat Tate - An American Artist 1928-1960 is a 1998 fictional biography by William Boyd.-Nat Tate:Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by Boyd and created as "an abstract expressionist who destroyed '99%' of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry...
, in which the character of Logan Mountstuart was first mentioned in 1998. Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, of whom a black-and-white photograph Boyd had found in a French second-hand shop was included. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952". Boyd described him as,
Boyd distinguished journal, biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
, and memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
as literary forms, different treatments of the same essential subject, the human condition, the change in medium justified his writing again of a whole-life view : "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered."
Boyd, though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of Any Human Heart took thirty months as he carefully plotted Mountstuart's life to be significant but seem random, a period during which he bought several hundred books. He spent another year and a half writing the book.
Synopsis
The book begins with a quotation from Henry James, "Never say you know the last word about any human heart." A short preface (an anonymous editor suggests it was written in 1987) explains that the earliest pages have been lost, and recounts briefly Logan Mountstuart's childhood in MontevideoMontevideo
Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...
, Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
before he moves to England aged seven with his English father and Uruguayan mother. In his final term at school he and two friends set challenges. Logan is to get on to the school's first XV rugby
Rugby union
Rugby union, often simply referred to as rugby, is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand...
team, Peter Scabius has to seduce Tess, a local farmer's daughter, and Ben Leeping, a lapsed Jew, has to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mountstuart enters Oxford on an exhibition and leaves with a third in History. Settling in London, he enjoys early success as a writer with: The Mind's Imaginings, a critically successful biography of Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
; The Girl Factory, a salacious novel about prostitutes which is poorly reviewed but sells well; and Les Cosmopolites, a respectable book on some obscure French poets
French poetry
French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.-French prosody and poetics:...
. Mountstuart embarks on a series of amorous encounters: he loses his virginity to Tess, is rejected by Land Forthergill whom he met at Oxford, and marries Lottie, an Earl's daughter. They live together at Thorpe Hall in Norfolk, where Mountstuart, unstimulated by slow country life or his warm but dull wife, becomes idle.
He meets Freya whilst on holiday, and begins an affair with her. Just before he departs for Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
to report on the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, Lottie unexpectedly visits and quickly realises another woman lives with him. On his return to England, following an acrimonious divorce, he marries Freya in Chelsea Town Hall. The newly-weds move to a house in Battersea
Battersea
Battersea is an area of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is an inner-city district of South London, situated on the south side of the River Thames, 2.9 miles south-west of Charing Cross. Battersea spans from Fairfield in the west to Queenstown in the east...
where Freya gives birth to their daughter, Stella. During The Second World War
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Mountstuart is recruited into the Naval Intelligence Division
Naval Intelligence Division
The Naval Intelligence Division was the intelligence arm of the British Admiralty before the establishment of a unified Defence Staff in 1965. It dealt with matters concerning British naval plans, with the collection of naval intelligence...
by Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
. He is sent to Portugal to monitor Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson; when they move to the Bahamas, Mountstuart follows, playing golf with the Duke and socialising regularly until the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. Mountstuart suspects the Duke is a conspirator after two hired detectives ask him to incriminate Oakes' son-in-law with false fingerprint evidence. Mountstuart refuses and is called a "Judas
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. He is best known for his betrayal of Jesus to the hands of the chief priests for 30 pieces of silver.-Etymology:...
" by Mrs. Simpson. Later in the war, Mountstuart is interned in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
for two years. After the war's end, he is grieved to discover that Freya, thinking him dead, had re-married and then died, along with Stella, in a V-2 bomb attack.
After the war, Mountstuart's life collapses as he seeks refuge in an alcoholic daze to escape his depression. He buys 10b Turpentine Lane, a small basement flat in Pimlico
Pimlico
Pimlico is a small area of central London in the City of Westminster. Like Belgravia, to which it was built as a southern extension, Pimlico is known for its grand garden squares and impressive Regency architecture....
. He returns to Paris to finish his existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
novella, The Villa by the Lake, staying with his old friend Ben (now a successful gallery owner). After a failed sexual encounter with Ordile, a young French girl working at Ben's gallery, he attempts suicide but is surprised by the girl when she returns an hour later for her Zippo lighter. Ben Leeping offers Mountstuart a job as manager of his new gallery in New York, "Leeping fils". Mountstuart mildly prospers in the art scene of 1960s, meeting artists like de Kooning (whom he admires) and Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
(whom he does not); he also moves in with an American lawyer, Alannah, and her two young daughters. On his return to London, he has an affair with Gloria, Peter Scabius' third wife (Peter has become a successful author of popular novels), as well as Janet, a New York gallery owner. He eventually discovers Alannah having her own affair, and the couple split. He reconciles with his son from his first marriage, Lionel, who has moved to New York to manage a pop group, until Lionel's sudden death. Monday, his girlfriend, moves into Mountstuart's flat; at first friends, they become intimates until her father turns up and Mountstuart discovers – to his horror – that she is sixteen (having told him she was nineteen). His lawyer advises him to leave America to avoid prosecution for statutory rape
Statutory rape
The phrase statutory rape is a term used in some legal jurisdictions to describe sexual activities where one participant is below the age required to legally consent to the behavior...
.
In the African journal, Mountstuart has become an English lecturer at the University College of Ikiri in Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
, from where he reports on the Biafran War. Mountstuart retires to London on a paltry pension and, now an old man, he is knocked over by a speeding post office van. In hospital he brusquely refuses to turn to religion, swearing his atheism and humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
to a priest. He recovers but is now completely destitute. To boost his income and publicise the state of hospitals, he joins the Socialist Patients Kollective (SPK) (which turns out to be a cell of the Baader-Meinhof Gang). He becomes the SPK's prize newspaper seller and is sent on a special mission to the continent. The trip ends with a brief interrogation by Special Branch, after which Mountstuart returns to his life of penury in London. With a new appreciation of life, he sells his flat and moves to a small village in the south of France, living in a house bequeathed to him by an old friend. He fits into the village well, introducing himself as an ecrivain who is working on a novel called Octet. As he contemplates his past life after the deaths of Peter and Ben, his old school friends, he muses:
Multiple selves
Multiplicity of self is introduced early on as a theme, to capture a "more riotous and disorganised reality", and the use of the journal as the novel's literary form is explicitly pointed to as developing this theme:"We keep a journal to entrap the collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being" the narrator explains. In an article in The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Boyd confirmed "this thesis that we are an anthology, a composite of many selves" is a theme of the book. While man's fundamental nature remains the same, he moves in and out of happiness, love and good health. Wisdom, as with age, is slowly acquired.
20th century
Boyd has previously written about the twentieth century through two characters; The New ConfessionsThe New Confessions
The New Confessions is a novel of the Scottish writer William Boyd. The book follows the life of John James Todd from his birth in Edinburgh up to his final exile on a Mediterranean island, having fled the USA from fear of being implicated in a murder...
was a fictional memoir, and Nat Tate a spoof biography. In Any Human Heart, Boyd uses the journal form as a fresh angle to pursue the subject from: "I wanted to invent my own exemplary figure who could seem almost as real as the real ones and whose life followed a similar pattern: boarding school, university, Paris in the 20s, the rise of Fascism, war, post-war neglect, disillusion, increasing decrepitude, and so on—a long, varied and rackety life that covered most of the century. Boyd sets Mountstuart's life within its context, tracing the grand arc of events during the 20th century by depiciting Mountstuart as swept along in the flow of history - he fights in World War II, sees the cultural revolution in the 1950s and 60s, and takes advantage of modern mass transit in his extensive travels around the world. Rather than being re-told in hindsight, their importance in context, historical events are seen through the petty lens of every-day living. For example, in an entry from the 1920s, Mountstuart notes "Coffee with Land Fothergill at the Cadena. She was wearing a velvet coat that matched her eyes. We talked a little stiffly about Mussolini and Italy and I was embarrassed to note how much better informed she was than I."
Boyd said he was partially inspired by the generation of English writers who matured between the wars: "I am fascinated by the life and work of that generation of English writers who were born at the beginning of the century and reached maturity by the time of World War II. People like Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
and Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
and Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
, obviously, but also less well known writers—Henry Green
Henry Green
Henry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke , an English author best remembered for the novel Loving, which was featured by Time in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.- Biography :Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family...
, Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan...
, Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
and William Gerhardie
William Gerhardie
William Alexander Gerhardie was a British novelist and playwright.Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s . H.G. Wells also championed his work...
. The last two in particular lurk closely behind Logan." Both real and imagined characters are blended into this context, where historical personages are typically used to concentrate the historical significance of a novel's plot, Mountstuart's encounters with them are superficial, leaving only an impression of both parties' small-mindedness. John Mullan
John Mullan
John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London. He specialises in 18th century fiction. He is currently working on the 18th-century section of the new Oxford English Literary History....
found the conceit most effective during the New York journal, where Boyd satirises figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement during the 1950s "whose characters seem almost beyond invention."
Genre and style
The novel is narrated in the first personFirst-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
through a series of nine journaux intimes, kept by the protagonist from age 17 until shortly before his death at 85. French literary journals, always published posthumously, are often extremely candid accounts, particularly of the author's sexual life. Boyd, himself a francophile, includes allusions to masturbation, prostitution and Mountstuart's three marriages. While Boyd had earlier written work in the form of memoir or biography, a journal is different: ""For a start, it's written without the benefit of hindsight, so there isn't the same feeling you get when you look back and add shape to a life. There are huge chunks missing." The novel's grounding in everyday life and focus on characterisation place it firmly within realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
.
Each journal covers a different period of Mountstuart's life, and they are usually geographically named: The School Journal, London I, etc. Boyd varied the narrator's tone in each to demonstrate changes in Mountstuart's character, in the first London Journal he is, according to Boyd, a "modernist aesthete", becoming a "world-weary cynic" in New York and finding "serene and elegiac serenity" in the final French journal. To support the book's historical themes and documentary premise, there is a feigned editorial apparatus: an index listing real people and their relation to Mountstuart alongside fictional characters, an editor's introduction (by Boyd), an authorial preface (by Mountstuart) and a list of works attributed to Logan Mountstuart. An additional stylistic feature is the anonymous editor, in fact Boyd, who introduces the book and offers explanatory footnotes, cross-references and attempts at dating. Since a journal is written from the perspective of each day, Mountstuart's moods change as events affect him. The form lends itself to "plotlessness", since the author/narrator inevitably cannot see the overall structure of the story. Plot lines which "fizzle and fade" emphasise the theme of multiple selves throughout life. Boyd adds other aspects to the work, such as parenthetical musings that are never answered, to re-enforce the style. His tone of voice gradually changes as he ages, Boyd wanted the style to reflect a major theme i.e. that we change and grow throughout life, "I wanted the literary tone of each journal to reflect this and so the voice subtly changes as you read on: from pretentious school boy to modern young decadent, to bitter realist to drink soaked cynic, to sage and serene octogenarian, and so forth."
Critical reception
Richard Eder, praised Any Human Heart in the New York Times, "William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks." Christopher Tayler, in the London Review of Books, called the characterisation of Mountstuart weak and wondered if he was merely a device through which Boyd could write pastiche about 20th century writers, "Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey." In The Atlantic MonthlyThe Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
, Brooke Allen liked the Mountstuart character: "he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life", thus making an "attractive central character" and Boyd's writing showed "a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism." The Atlantic Monthly selected it as one of the "books of the year".
In The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, Tim Adams complimented the opening sections as "nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student." but criticised the "predictability" of Mountstuart's "walk-on part in literary history" and ultimately the suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...
, particularly the Baader-Meinhoff passages, concluding "For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion." Tom Cox, in The Daily Telegraph disagreed, he praised the characterisation, calling Mountstuart "a man whose fragile egotism and loose-fitting story has you frequently forgetting you're reading fiction, and even more frequently forgetting you're reading at all." Giles Foden
Giles Foden
Giles Foden is an English author best known for his award-winning novel The Last King of Scotland .-Biography:Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to Malawi in 1971 where he was raised...
, in The Guardian, found the New York art-scene sections weakest, saying they "puncture the realism Boyd has so carefully built up in the rest of the novel." Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani
is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...
agreed that Mountstuart's youth was well evoked, but that the description of his retirement and poverty was "as carefully observed and emotionally resonant". While in the early part of the book, "the characters' marionette strings [are] carefully hidden" later Boyd tried to play God, resulting in "an increasingly contrived narrative that begins to strain our credulity."
Boyd, who spends his summer in the south of France, has a large audience in that country and several French journals noted the publication of Any Human Heart.L'express called Boyd a "magician" and Le Devoir also noticed the imagination of his creation, calling it "first of all, an admirable work of forgery". Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
called it "very good Boyd. Perhaps even his magnum opus".
The novel was nominated on the longlist of the Man Booker Prize
Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...
in 2002, and on the shortlist of the Dublin Impac Literary Award
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...
in 2004. In 2009, Boyd commented that "[it] didn't get particularly good reviews, yet I've never had so many letters about a novel. It's selling fantastically well seven years on, and we're about to turn it into six hours of telly for Channel 4, so something about that novel gets to readers."
Television adaptation
On the 15 April 2010, Channel Four announced the making of a four part television serial based on the novel. William Boyd wrote the screenplay, with (successively) Sam ClaflinSam Claflin
Samuel George "Sam" Claflin is an English actor, perhaps best known for his role in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides....
, Matthew Macfadyen
Matthew Macfadyen
David Matthew Macfadyen is an English actor, known for his role as MI5 intelligence officer Tom Quinn in the BBC television drama series Spooks and for starring as Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.In June, 2010 Macfadyen won a British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting...
and Jim Broadbent
Jim Broadbent
James "Jim" Broadbent is an English theatre, film, and television actor. He is known for his roles in Iris, Moulin Rouge!, Topsy-Turvy, Hot Fuzz, and Bridget Jones' Diary...
playing Logan Mountstuart as he ages. It was broadcast from 21 November 2010 to 12 December 2010. The series was rebroadcast in 3 episodes in 2011 in the United States on PBS as part of the Masterpiece Classic program.
External links
- Book page on the author's website
- Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
, April 2002, "Fellow travelling with the famous" - FT WeekendFinancial TimesThe Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
, 2002-04-27, The Front Line: "Success with a wry smile" - The TelegraphThe Daily TelegraphThe Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
, 2010-11-21, Television and Radio: "Gillian Anderson: People are pigeonholed too much"