The Romantic: William Boyd

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The life of Cashel spanning 80 years in the 19th Century tales in both real and fictional drama, woven together expertly. Ross involves himself in an unlikely escapade; it appears to go well; it turns out exceptionally badly; Ross escapes through some quirk of chance. Yet Boyd’s focus on Romanticism itself is perfunctory, and he is generally more interested in the poets’ famous libidos than in any literary dimension of their lives. However, unlike that epic yet intimate tale of political intrigue and erotic frustration, Boyd’s novel is more of an historical soap opera than a literary masterpiece.

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. Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Unfortunately Cashel Greville Ross doesn’t have the charisma of Boyd’s earlier “whole-life” heroes – or heroine, in the case of Sweet Caress. But that probably is just me looking for a fault, thinking there must be something that could have been better.I’d enjoyed both enormously and saw no reason why I’d feel any differently about this one, set a hundred years earlier. In the process he gains both friends and enemies leading him to adopt new identities from time to time.

He sleeps with Mary Shelley’s step-sister Claire Clairmont and falls in love with a teenage friend of Byron’s mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, becoming her cavalier servente (which is repeatedly misspelt). Admittedly it is a fair criticism that you do eventually come to expect the inevitable outcome of his endeavours. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer ‘When people dismiss storytelling, I say: “Well, you have a go at it”’: William Boyd photographed at home in London, September 2022.In fact I can't believe I've not read Any Human Heart so I've added that to my out of control reading pile and will wait for a time to read when I can savour it. Cashel Greville, later Cashel Greville Ross, born 1799, grows up on the Co Cork estate of Stillwell Court, thinking he’s an orphan and the ward of Elspeth, the governess.

Cashel lives a remarkable life across the century as a soldier, a lover, a prisoner, a farmer, a family man and father, explorer, addict and consul, with some constant figures in his life, such as his brothers, Ben Smart, and later Burton himself. The lifelong association that Cashel carries with him as a Waterloo veteran reminded me of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March in which Captain Joseph Trotta saves the life of the young Kaiser Frank Joseph 1, on the battlefield at Solferino. There is a moment in this novel where the protagonist reads his own obituary – then cheerfully moves on.

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. However, as we know from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’. It goes adrift from the first page in the author's note when Boyd 'admits' that he has constructed Cashel Greville Ross's biography from a part written autobiography and a collection of letters and sketches, maps and plans. You can polish your prose until it gleams, but a story that has readers wanting to know what happens next … that’s something you discard at your peril. Cue Waterloo; demobilisation with honours; a brief spell as an officer in the massacre-prone East India Company army in Ceylon; then on to Italy, where Cashel arrives in Pisa just in time to become pals with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron.