Love is Blind

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I’d lived the life of these characters and at the end of both books I experienced a tearful moment when I reached the final page. 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”.

It means that he can escape the clutches of his unbearably grotesque, hypocrital and bullying preacher father, Malky. My point here isn’t to chart the extent of Love is Blind’s Chekhovian overlay but just to reflect on what the internet adds – and takes away from – reading fiction. 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.

This novel takes place during the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century so piano tuning was an extremely important job and Brodie was known as the best piano tuner in Europe. Our guide for the duration of Love is Blind is a young man who hails from Scotland named Brodie Moncur. Love Is Blind is by no means terrible, but it certainly isn’t one of Boyd’s best and I can only give it a ve I liked how Boyd used the piano tuning business as platform to enable Brodie to launch his career, assist key musicians, find love and travel the world.

They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet). Again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the past catches up to them, and in their moment of panic, Lika leaves Brodie for another man.After a dip in which he produced some well-written, commercially successful but slightly anonymous thrillers, Boyd is back on a form few of his contemporaries can match.

The descriptions are delightful, accurate both in their detail and in their relaying of historical events of the time. Overall, the plot itself was a slow going at times and I did get a little overwhelmed in some areas. 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. A rich historical piece that showcases a number of key European destinations, Love is Blind offers an interesting reading experience.Boyd on form is the ultimate in immersive fiction, and Love is Blind is Boyd at the top of his game . When we first meet principal character Brodie Moncur in Scotland, we glean more about the difficult upbringing of this ambitious young man.

Now, whereof Nerias knew that his son Sedacius was caught in the snares of harlots and indeed had lusted after his brother’s wife, Ruth, and his brother’s daughter, Esther, and showed no remorse, yet Nerias suffered his son to live in his own house, yea, and fed him and his servants also. I liked little snippets such as that although Brodie became fluent in French, it was owing to sheer hard work – he never mastered Russian or German, so clearly wasn’t a natural linguist – somehow this minor detail interspersed in the story made him more real. I read Any Human Heart when it came out in 2002 and, like hundreds of thousands, loved it immediately.The fact that Moncur is, like Chekhov, a consumptive, is an obvious link, but there are many others, from a plot which can be seen as amplifying the closing lines of Chekhov’s short story ‘The Lady and the Dog’ to a number of other details drawn from Chekhov’s own life. It is quite a Scots characteristic – the British Empire was heavily populated by Scots in all corners of the globe. It was as if William Boyd fell asleep, and I felt I was reading a completely (tedious) different story, that was in no way connected to the first half.