When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind.
In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’. As in his earlier work, there’s still plenty of globe-trotting and journeying through the past, but his place within British writing has landed up closer to John le Carré and the higher end of Frederick Forsyth. In 2013, Boyd was commissioned to write a James Bond novel, Solo, but – in contrast to Sebastian Faulks’s Bond book Devil May Care – the result didn’t feel like a holiday from the author’s usual output so much as a more distilled version of it.
Two years ago, Boyd even lamented that ‘Flaubert’s pernickety paragraph-a-week model… has become the template for serious writing at the furthest reaches of the literary novel’. He appeared to claim as his own model the less fashionable Stendhal, ‘a sort of hack… who wrote his great novel The Red and the Black in 60 days’. He defiantly went on:
When people dismiss storytelling, I say: ‘Well, you have a go at it.’ 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.
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