The New Confessions – William Boyd (Hamish Hamilton 1987)

I ponder all the possibilities that come with being human.

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Boyd’s ability to convey a sweep of 20th-century history, as seen through the eyes of a first-person narrator, is really impressive. This narrator, John James Todd (a prototype for Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart), fights in the First World War, is a news reporter in the Second, and a photographer, philanderer and film director either side and in between. His film career takes him from the silent screen to ‘talkies’, and from Berlin to Hollywood; it also provides Boyd with opportunities to philosophise about the medium’s power and limitations, as well as the relationship between art and life. Todd narrates the book retrospectively from a Mediterranean island villa, which turns out to be more than just an elderly man’s retreat from the world’s bustle.

The descriptions of his early life in Edinburgh are funny, from his father’s refusal to shave the ‘twin dense sickles of beard’ that grew above his cheekbones, to the housekeeper, Oonagh’s peculiar methods of childcare – ‘My God, Oonagh had a lot to answer for.’ And there is an excellent section on Todd’s time at a questionable Scottish boarding school ‘which had no uniform apart from the kilt, a garment I had never worn.’ Edinburgh and its surrounding coast and countryside are skillfully rendered – the pen of an old man recording the sights of his much younger eyes. Throughout the book the elderly narrator comments on what his former selves should have known or guessed, why another character found him attractive or repellent, and – most often – why on earth he made the decisions he did. These attempts to understand himself better and – as the title suggests – to bare all, often with painful honesty, are what make the novel. And I think this must be more effective the older the reader. For Todd’s life has been very full, and very full of unexpected and often toe-curling decisions that he needs to explain to himself as much as to anyone else.

The title also refers to the film that makes Todd’s name in his early career, the sequel to which becomes the focus of his remaining life. It is this project – one that has as much to do with living as it has with art – that draws in many of the characters he encounters in his life, most notably a German prison guard who was one of ‘only two [who] had led me down the cul-de-sac of my own mortality.’

My favourite part deals with his experience of trench warfare at the Third Battle of Ypres. It is a coming-of-age sequence in almost every sense – death, friendship, love, self-awareness – and combines the chaotic carnage of going over the top with some blackly comic episodes including a gas attack and a foul-mouthed Scottish Bantam battalion. It also contains the fascinating details of Todd’s experimental war footage, culminating in a life-altering accident while trying for an aerial shot of a battlefield.

And the narrator’s nemesis in the novel is altogether unexpected.