By William Boyd, Knopf, 384 pages, $17
William Boyd’s layered and intricate novel begins close to its end point, with a brief prologue in the form of a 1906 letter from a British penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. In it, an American anthropologist called Page Arbogast tells her sister, Amelia, about the recent arrival of a new assistant, “a tall young Scotsman, about thirty-five years old, called Brodie Moncur”.
Exactly what Brodie is doing there is a mystery that will remain unresolved for almost the entire book. It’s a classic example of Boyd getting things off to a propulsive start, and on the surface Love Is Blind has all the hallmarks of a slow-burning thriller — the event-packed story of a single decade in Brodie’s life.
We first encounter him in 1896, in the window of Channon & Co, an Edinburgh piano shop, where he works as a tuner. At 24, he’s handsome and has perfect pitch, but is also (in a slight twist on the archetypal blind piano tuner) severely short-sighted. Without his “Franklin” bifocal spectacles, the world appears to Brodie as nothing more than a vague mist, “utterly aqueous”; it’s an early sign that this young Scotsman’s vision is not necessarily to be trusted.
From Edinburgh, he’s dispatched to the Channon showroom in Paris, where he dreams up the idea of paying a virtuoso to endorse the firm’s pianos, and strikes a deal with the 40-something John Kilbarron, an Irish concert pianist with a declining but still bankable reputation. Brodie is swiftly drawn into Kilbarron’s orbit, which includes his mistress, the beautiful would-be opera singer, Lydia “Lika” Blum, and his sinister, cheroot-smoking brother, Malachi.
Ominously, Brodie’s first sight of Lika is as a tall, fair-haired blur. Even though he’s wearing his glasses, she’s standing “at the very limits of both the lenses in his Franklin spectacles”, as if he can’t quite get a purchase on who she is; as if she is, somehow, unknowable. Already smitten, he’s struck by “a sense of something impending, unsure if it was good or bad”. So struck, in fact, that he invents a noun to describe the feeling: impendingment, and then an adverb, impendingmently, to qualify it.
It’s a gently humorous moment, as if Boyd is drawing our attention to the tricks of his narrative trade — to his renowned storytelling knack of keeping us turning the pages to see what happens next. It’s also an early warning, though, one of the many instances in the novel that express the Boydian idea that the course of a life can change in an instant and everything can be lost in a heartbeat.
Sure enough, after Brodie and Lika embark on a dangerous affair under John Kilbarron’s nose and the “brown, watchful eyes” of his brother, calamity soon arrives, though from a shocking and completely unforeseen quarter. It’s at this point in the story that Boyd discreetly begins to show his hand — to shine a light back on some of the threads and details he’s scattered earlier, and to reveal what sort of novel this is.
He has always experimented with form, varying the way in which he presents us with the story of a life. In the past he’s given us, for example, the fictive autobiography of John James Todd in The New Confessions; the fake journal of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart; and the invented life of the artist Nat Tate, in the hoax biography of the same name. In Love Is Blind, he’s giving us something else. You might call it “the entwined life”: a novel in which the made-up life of a Scottish piano tuner becomes meta-fictionally entwined with that of its author’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov.
It all happens without Brodie ever being aware of it. When, on the promenade at Nice, he meets a tall Russian doctor with a pointy beard who is suffering from tuberculosis, he has no idea who he is. The two men discuss Brodie’s difficult love life, and the stranger, laughing wryly to himself, observes: “Complications, oh yes ... life without complications isn’t really a life. In life things go wrong, nothing stays the same and there’s nothing you can do about it.” When, in due course and in a thick accent, he tells Brodie his name, it sounds, comically and rather weirdly, like “Archibald”. But readers alert to Boyd’s habit of dropping real people into his novels might recognise — even if Brodie doesn’t — that this is the great Russian short story writer and dramatist.
Boyd, a self-confessed “Chekhov obsessive”, doesn’t tell us that Chekhov, like Brodie, had a passionate relationship with a blond would-be opera singer whose name happened to be Lika. 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.
From the beginning of the book — concerned as it is with the relationship between life and art, truth and performance — there are hints that Chekhov is going to be important. An epigraph quotes Chekhov’s wife, Olga Knipper: “During the last year of his life Anton thought of writing another play,” a play about a man who “loves a woman who either does not love him or is unfaithful to him”.
Brodie’s Lika, we’re told, has “a little dog”, and before the novel is over she will have been referred to as “the lady with the little dog” — the exact title of one of Chekhov’s most celebrated short stories. “You look a bit Russian,” she says when Brodie grows a beard; Scotland, she tells him, when they arrive there in an attempt to shake off Malachi Kilbarron, reminds her of Russia, “the mood, the landscape, the poverty”. And when, one day, a gun — a small “muff-pistol” — accidentally drops out of her handbag, it’s hard not to think of Chekhov’s famous literary maxim, that “one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off”.
Where, you begin to wonder, is Boyd going with all this? Why, without Brodie being aware of it, is his life absorbing details from Chekhov’s? Is it a literary game, or something more?
It is, of course, something more. Boyd is, as Chekhov was, a fiercely secular writer, and if Brodie’s life can be seen as the inspiration for a play the dying Chekhov never wrote, then Love Is Blind is, at its heart, Chekhovian in its outlook. Which is to say that the only gods on display here are the gods of love and time and death. It’s what the novel’s about: these are the implacable forces majeures that shape our haphazard lives and our complicated, unresolved relationships with others.
It’s something of a paradox that this “play”, with its vision of life as a chaotic kind of lottery, arrives in such an assiduously organised package as Love Is Blind. But then that’s always been the tension at the heart of Boyd’s work: that he gives us life’s game of snakes and ladders in the form of carefully plotted, self-consciously structured novels. It’s a paradox that makes this book feel like a very personal one — a book in which Boyd repeatedly reflects on how art, though constructed, has the capacity to produce effects that are ineffable. (It goes without saying that Chekhov’s short stories are far more meticulously made than they appear.) As Brodie, gazing into the innards of one of the pianos he’s been called upon to tune, puts it: “Mysteries — music, time, movement — reduced to complex, elaborate mechanisms.”
There are moments when the plot feels overwrought and doesn’t quite convince; Malachi’s psychology, for example, is too glibly explained, and the last few lines are unnecessary and overly neat. Nevertheless, Boyd’s drama builds powerfully towards its ending, when at last Brodie arrives in the Bay of Bengal, and where he unwittingly mouths (in German) some of Chekhov’s own words. In its poignant closing scenes, the book balances the sad and ordinary randomness of life — its bathos even — with a kind of transcendence born out of Brodie’s longing. It’s a finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Carys Davies’s novel West is published by Granta.
