Love is Blind

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A particular highlight for me was Boyd's skill in making the era come alive with his rich vibrant descriptions. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future – and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. I felt sympathetic towards him and his grand amour, despite his stubborn refusal to acknowledge Lika’s ultimately cruel treatment of him.

When we first meet principal character Brodie Moncur in Scotland, we glean more about the difficult upbringing of this ambitious young man. This is the first in a chain of many travels that will see Brodie living in Nice, Biarritz, Geneva, Trieste, an estate in Russia and even the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean! Brodie] does leave, this time forever, a fugitive of sorts covering his tracks in various European cities before alighting—the novel’s only stumble—in Trieste, where things become briefly silly. So we shouldn’t perhaps be too surprised that the Lika here in his new novel – also a blonde, buxom, would-be opera singer – is very like the Lika there. From 1861 to her death twenty-three years later, Brodie had recently calculated, she had given birth to fourteen children, five of them stillborn or dead within days of their parturition.Boyd’s lively 15th novel careens across the world following a consumptive, dueling, romantic piano tuner named Brodie Moncur. You really get to know and believe in his characters, envisage the places they visit, and in this period piece, feel you are in the late 19th/early 20th Century.

But as Brodie’s life lurches from one catastrophe to another, and as he and the maddeningly opaque fictional Lika make their way across Europe, the ghost of the young Scot’s real-life doppelganger never feels far away.

Twenty years ago, at a New York party hosted by David Bowie, William Boyd launched his monograph Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-60 about the abstract expressionist who destroyed 99 per cent of his work before committing suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. The machinations of the plot are quite involved, and what with the problems of his TB (rather gorily described if you’re faint hearted!