Boyd, William (1952- ) novelist, journalist, screenwriter, film director

William Andrew Murray Boyd was born on March 7, 1952, in Accra, Ghana. His Scottish parents were Alexander Murray Boyd, a doctor, and Evelyn Boyd, a teacher. He grew up in Ghana and Nigeria, and his early experiences there formed the basis of much of his later work. Of the Biafran War he has said, “It was crazy, idiotic, and not at all like I imagined war to be. All my received opinions from books and television turned out to be misguided.” He would express this same sentiment in one of his early novels, An Ice-Cream War (1982). As a youth Boyd boarded at Gordonstoun School in Scotland, an institution known for its regimentation and high educational standards. He explored this setting as well in several novels and short stories, later commenting that “very little has been written about those schools that rings remotely true. Like Harry Potter, being a classic example. Utter nonsense, in terms of being entirely unrealistic.”

Afterward, Boyd studied at the universities of Nice and Glasgow, where he first began publishing short stories in literary journals. He considers the 1970s a time when it was relatively easy for young writers to publish short stories, a genre he treats as a laboratory wherein he can experiment freely with narrative technique. Boyd married Susan Anne Wilson in 1975, then, in 1980, completed a Ph.D. at Jesus College, Oxford, with a dissertation on Joseph Conrad. He was subsequently appointed lecturer in English literature at St. Hilda’s College.

However, he did not work in academia long, for the beginning of his varied and illustrious literary career roughly coincided with the completion of his studies. After winning second place in a short story contest sponsored by the Oxford magazine Isis, he went on to publish his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), which won both the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, establishing Boyd as a rising literary star. This comic novel was praised for its dexterity as a farce. In the same year, Boyd also published a collection of his early short stories, On the Yankee Station and Other Stories. Starting in 1981 he also became television critic for the New Statesman, a position he occupied until 1983, when he retired from teaching.

Boyd’s second novel, An Ice-Cream War (1982), presented a more serious side that would come to characterize his best works. Set during World War I, it details the British campaign against the German colony of Tanganyika (Tanzania) from the perspective of two of its participants, the brothers Gabriel and Felix Cobb. The book was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Boyd’s subsequent novels spanned a wide range of topics and narrative approaches, although he always remained a devoted and skilled realist, garnering comparisons to Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, and Kingsley Amis. Much like Graham Greene, he has alternated between more serious works of literary fiction and light comic novels, although, again like Greene, Boyd blurs this distinction considerably.

Stars and Bars (1984) portrays an English art appraiser trying to make his way through New York City and the American Deep South, handicapped by the difficulties of trying to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers as he searches for a collection of works by a sought-after painter.

The New Confessions (1987) presents a complicated and playful narrative in which a Scottish filmmaker reflects on his life from retirement; most of his recollections center on the production of his masterpiece, a film adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. The complexity of this novel won Boyd great praise; many consider it his first significant work.

Brazzaville Beach (1990), the tale of an English divorcee who researches the behavior of chimpanzees, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well as the 1991 McVitie’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. The Blue Afternoon (1993), which details an encounter between an architect and a man who may be her father in 1930s Los Angeles, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction.

Boyd achieved his greatest fame as a novelist with two works about fictional personas: Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960 (1998), which purported to be a biography of a neglected American painter, and Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002), which explores the 20th century through the journal of Logan Clinton, a fictional, globe-trotting man of letters. In these mature works, Boyd demonstrates his ability to traverse a great number of topics both satirically and seriously, and always with a playful, intellectual pleasure. His latest novel, Restless, won the 2006 Costa Novel Award.

In addition to his fiction, Boyd has written for television, radio, and the big screen, adapting several of his own works (A Good Man in Africa, Stars and Bars, Armadillo) as well as those of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop 1986) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). He was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 2005.

Critical Analysis. While William Boyd is a highly versatile writer, creating complex mathematical metaphors, discussing aviation technology, African history, and the details of American life with equal facility, and using realistic detail to create palpably convincing characters, he is most highly regarded for the works in which he employs biographical genres as his chief narrative device. These works contrast in tone with his comic novels, which follow in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.

The earliest of the biographical genres, The New Confessions (1987), related the story of the life of a Scottish filmmaker, John James Todd, who reflects on the experiences that led him to become obsessed with Rousseau’s Confessions (he acquired a copy of the book while in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the last years of World War I), and his subsequent quest to adapt it into a series of silent films. Only one part of this epic project is ever realized, however, and Todd’s career ends disastrously in the 1950s when he is persecuted for his association with his leading actress, a member of the Communist Party. The sprawling inclusiveness of this novel was markedly different from Boyd’s earlier, tightly plotted farcical works. It also allowed him an opportunity to discourse on cinema, a medium he was already quite familiar with and fascinated by through his work as a screenwriter.

In 1998 Boyd created a scandal in the literary and art world with the publication of his Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960. This novel, complete with photographs of paintings, recounted the life of a neglected artist living on Long Island who, discovered at last and lauded by the art world, takes his own life after suffering a nervous breakdown. The book was presented as a biography, duping numerous art critics who claimed to be familiar with Tate’s work. The hoax was revealed quickly (Boyd was not interested in playing a mean-spirited trick), and in a long article written in his own defense, Boyd described the book as “studded with covert and cryptic clues and hints as to its real, fictive status. For me, the author, this was part of the pleasure—a form of Nabokovian relish in the sheer play and artifice— and the fundamental aim of the book, it became clear to me, was to destabilize, to challenge our notions of authenticity.” This description echoes the joy he takes in fiction at large: “Writing fiction is absolute freedom. As an art form it is so boundlessly generous.”

Boyd’s third and most ambitious work in this vein, Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002), was inspired by an obscure French writer, Valery Larbaud, who published numerous works as the imaginary writer A. O. Barnabooth. Boyd’s work chronicles the life of Logan Montstuart, an itinerant man of letters who manages to bump elbows with many of the greatest European writers of the 20th century in hilariously awkward situations. Traveling the world over, Montstuart gives the reader an intimate account of the salient events of the century. In many ways, the book is about literature itself, particularly the pleasures it offers through accident and surprise as well as its ultimate limitations, and how all of these help shape an individual’s life.

Other Works by William Boyd:
- Armadillo. New York: Knopf, 1998.
- Bamboo: Essays and Criticism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.
- The Blue Afternoon. New York: Knopf, 1995.
- The Destiny of Natalie “X” and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1997.
- Fascination: Stories. New York: Knopf, 2005. Protobiography. London: Penguin, 2005.
- School Ties. New York: W. Morrow, 1985.

Works about William Boyd:
- Agudo, Juan Francisco Elices. The Satiric Worlds of William Boyd: A Case-Study. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
- “Boyd, William.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 231, British Novelists Since 1960, Fourth Series, edited by Merritt Moseley, 31-40. Farmington Mills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2000.