Like a fine taxidermist, his craft creates such amusingly hyperreal results that you can sometimes forget what a grim business it is’ … William Boyd. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diaries that she meant to write about death, but “life came breaking in as usual”. In The Romantic, as in all of Boyd’s best books, life is always breaking in. The sentences – even the death sentences – thrum with life: its seemingly irreversible errors, decisions and indignities. There is a moment in this novel where the protagonist reads his own obituary – then cheerfully moves on. Later in the book, a “simple” headstone will be etched with the wrong name. Life stumbles onward. The mistakes are many. But the reading, and the writing, never stop. He should be concentrating on his job as an art assessor, but his complicated personal life keeps intruding. And that’s before we even get to his sense of alienation, of being a fish out of water. For Henderson is a shy man lost in a country of extraverts and weirdos. Subway poets, loony millionaires, Bible-bashers and sharp-suited hoods stalk him wherever he goes. But it is only when he’s sent to America’s deep South to examine a rare collection of paintings that matters take a life-threatening turn. Still, if it doesn’t kill you, they say it can only make you stronger . . . A wonderful romp through the 19th century, mixing fact and fiction seamlessly. Our hero manages to, amongst other things, get involved in the Battle of Waterloo, mix with Byron and Shelley in Italy, help find the source of the River Nile, become the author of best selling books and have an 60 year love affair. He has written several to date, among them 1987’s The New Confessions and 2018’s Love Is Blind, but is perhaps most celebrated for his 2002 classic, Any Human Heart, the book against which all other birth-to-death novels are measured, and often found wanting. The Romantic is one of the books on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 but it had been on my RADAR long before that. The Romantic has been compared by other readers to one of William Boyd’s earlier books, Any Human Heart, which is also a ‘whole life’ story, albeit set in a different period. I haven’t read that book although it is on my virtual TBR pile.

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I’ve read a lot of William Boyd over the years (though not the complete seventeen novels that he’s now produced) and he’s the closest I’ve come to a comfort read. This latest work, for the first time, did feel a bit too much like a re-hash of earlier work. Boyd calls a number of his novels “whole life” stories, and Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is possibly the one most lauded, and the one early reviewers have compared to The Romantic. This was a wonderfully crafted cradle to grave story of Cashel Greville Ross. Written as a fictional biography Boyd weaves in true historical events and people giving us a insightful sweep into 19th century life spanning many countries and continents. I enjoyed reading about Ross as a character and all of his adventures and relationships. A great immersive story. You sense that, ultimately, Boyd had huge fun writing it – a writer living his own ideal life to the fullest.

William Boyd’s latest excursion into fictional biography, aptly entitled The Romantic, is the fourth of the “whole-life” novels he has made his speciality, following The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015). It will almost certainly do, as far as his legion of admiring readers is concerned. Yet Jeffrey’s second sentence, less well known than his first, highlights the peculiarity of Boyd’s now systematic treatment of this cradle-to-grave genre.London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatr A fantastical, fabulous journey that sees Ross present at the battle of Waterloo, befriend Shelley and Byron in Italy, become a farmer in America and an explorer in Africa. Along the way he finds love several times but most significantly with Raphaella who he can never truly forget. He is romantic… Adventures call him… He finds himself in Italy where he inevitably meets the greatest romantics of the time – Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron… A romantic, properly speaking, is someone who believes that emotion should prevail over reason. But the problem with The Romantic isn’t that it’s too emotional (read: sentimental). It’s that it gives you lots of second-hand spectacle and no fresh feeling. Rather than a voyage of discovery, it’s a tour of familiar landmarks.

This has been a central question of many of the stronger novels by the contemporaries who joined Boyd on Granta’s famous 1983 Best of Young British Novelists list: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot , Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy could all be said to be about the leftovers of a life – and what remains of history. In such company, Boyd is sometimes seen as a more “accessible” or “commercial” writer. But what is often lost behind the sheer pleasure brought by his books is their layered Chekhovian subtleties: Boyd is abundantly talented at capturing life’s disconnections, in prose that provides no easy consolations. This may be why the “whole life” novel, exemplified by Any Human Heart , occupies such a special place in his body of work, and why it is satisfying to see him return to this cradle-to-grave territory. Before long, he is in Africa trying to find the source of the Nile – because, frankly, why not? – and later still becomes the Nicaraguan consul to Trieste. It is all breathless stuff, its plot occasionally outlandish but necessarily oiled for the convenience of keeping the narrative powering forward.All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts.’ - Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life. Picaresque . . . these is a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that ― Scotsman You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. It’s a great achievement by Boyd to produce this book and it’s thoroughly enjoyable with flashes of humour, warmth and fascinating insights into some interesting real- life characters like Byron and Richard Burton from the Nineteenth century. Wandering through Africa wasn’t that much different, in a sense, from wandering through London, or Paris, or Boston. You thought the road ahead was obvious and well marked but more often than not the destination you had so clearly in mind would never be reached. Never. Things got in the way. There were diversions, problems, changes of mind, changes of heart…