Boyd Up

I am usually a ready recepticle for the disposal of worthwhile books and so was the grateful recipient of William Boyd's Trio. It's no more than two days' worth of reading, not only because it goes down easily but because one wants to get back to it but it is 340 pages. In Graham Greene's differentiation between literature and entertainment, it might not quite be literature but it's high quality entertainment.

It deals in not-quite 60's stereotypes. Its claim to be 'art' might depend on it being about an actress making a film in Brighton about an actress making a film in Brighton which gives it layers but, as the title serves to emphasize, there are three stories going on and I dare say they will be brought together in the denouement.

Without being a roman a clef, we might well see elements of Diana Dors and Donald Sinden in two characters and one is taken with the novelist, Elfrida's, project to write about Virginia Woolf's last day even though she,

sat down on a bench and began to read 'To the Lighthouse' simply to pass the time but recognizing, a few pages in, that she'd forgotten how much she actually disliked the novel, with its footling detail and its breathy, neurasthenic apprehension of the world, all tingling awareness and high cheek-boned sensitivity.

 

And, yes, maybe. There is almost always the other point of view and nobody's untouchable. I've mostly always thought Virginia was a tremendous writer without that meaning I took her whole life and personality as in any way heroic and one does need to listen to the case against.

If the case against William Boyd is that he's not Julian Barnes then that's not so bad. If he can write books that aren't quite unputdownable but are so readily pickupable then he's doing fine.

 

It is consummately professionally well done, for what it is, and after 15 novels and a lot of stories, you'd hope so but one knows one is safe in his hands. The same applied to the film on telly the other night, Lie with Me (Arrête avec tes mensonges), 2022.

I'm no great watcher of cinema but saw a few wonderful French efforts in the 1990's with the likes of Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart at their best. It seemed to me that France were a class apart at doing such things - with all due respect to The Remains of the Day - and so it's good to see that they still are. It's almost a formula, the past revealing itself after so many years in changed circumstances, but it works and I only wonder how much French cinema I've missed out on in the interim because these days neither the telly or any local arthouse seems to provide them any more.