A small observation before we get on, I bet William Boyd keeps a notebook in which he jots names he might use for characters because he's very strong in that department and there's a certain style to a Boyd name - it usually says a lot about the person who bears it.
Anyway, Love is Blind, his new novel, is the story of Brodie Moncur, an expert piano tuner in the Edinburgh of the 1890s. Brodie is a pleasingly Boydian protagonist and a likely lad - bright, bold, keen to escape his domineering father and his featureless siblings who are under the paternal thumb, so when his boss at Channon & Co. piano manufacturers offers him a superior position at the Paris branch of the firm, Brodie is quick to accept.
In Paris Brodie comes up with a grand scheme to raise the firm's profile: have a big name of the concert stage endorse the Channon piano. John Kilbarron, 'the Irish Liszt', is the man he secures, and it is Brodie's skill with the piano, adjusting the instrument to minute degrees in order to have it suit its player's touch, that makes this a winning combination.
But then Brodie meets Lika, Kilbarron's Russian muse and mistress, and there's no saving him.
What follows is an account of a curious love affair - I say 'curious', but really the clue is in the book's title, its subtitle ('The Rapture of Brodie Moncur'), and its two epigraphs, but while the reader is saying, "don't do it, Brodie, she's not worth ruining your life over!", the man is following his heart, and that's all there is to be said.
What I particularly loved about the book is the musical content; the piano tuning aspect is fascinating (by the way, if you don't already know T.E. Carhart's marvellous The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, mentioned here and here, then do read it also); the running theme of the power of music to evoke an emotional and physical response - and Boyd dissects this, fascinatingly; the parallels between Brodie Moncur and both Frédéric Chopin and, on the literary front, Robert Louis Stevenson. Boyd is an exceptionally good storyteller and his extensive research furnishes the book in comprehensive and opulent manner (I'll let him off the couple of Edinburgh details he got wrong), and he's excellent at infusing the singular, personal, and particular with the essence of a period or a cultural ethos - his sense of the balance of 'flavours' is keen.
In sum, this novel is a strong candidate for my books of the year list - on which general topic see this article by Alexander McCall Smith!
Comments