William Boyd has written a dozen novels and short stories in the past quarter-century. That makes him a fairly prolific author. Factor in a dozen screenplays realised (and another couple of dozen that were never made, for the usual inscrutable film-world reasons), and he seems properly Stakhanovite. But take a deep breath, because Boyd estimates that in his moments of leisure he has also written three-quarters of a million words or so of journalism.
Given this, it is rather startling to find, in the first 20 pages of this selection of essays and reviews, three references to his ‘laziness’ at school. Less surprising is to find that what it is he admires, as an adult, is doggedness (a favourite term), determination. In a review of Julian Schnabel’s film of the life of the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat he writes, ‘There is no medium or longterm substitute for talent, hard work, elaboration and exploration of technique, intelligence, hard work, empathy, thought, virtuosity, hard work, and so on. This is the serious artist’s lot.’ And this, too, is the core of Boyd’s value-system.
He is unimpressed with easy routes, with formulas or genres. Much (most, indeed) writing on war he dismisses out of hand, because it is written to a formula that runs, ‘War is hell/shocking/depraved/inhuman but it provides intense and compensatory moments of comradeship/joy/vivacity/emotion or excitement.’ Instead he wants to know how things are put together; and his ‘let’s-take-the-clock-apart-to-see-how-it-works’ mentality produces some of his best pieces. When he writes at length about authors he admires he made me want to read them again: his piece on William Golding’s Rites of Passage gave me new insight into a novelist I thought I knew; when looking at Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, he carefully anatomises the novel’s complex technical basis, examining what it is an author does, what are the choices he has made.
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