William Boyd has no complaints at all about the writer’s life.
“I’m not a tormented artist,” he affirms, and there’s a fluency about his output that suggests he simply hasn’t got time for that brand of self-absorption: 19 published novels and counting, three volumes of short stories, scripts by the score for film, television and theatre, and a steady stream of journalism have poured from his pen in a 45-year career.
Now in his mid-70s, he shows no sign of slowing down.
This month sees the publication of Cold Sunset, the third in his Gabriel Dax thriller series – Boyd calls them “spy novels with extras” – about which he will be speaking at Barnes BookFest this month.
He is also planning a fictionalised biography of 19th-century French novelist Stendhal and a stage version of Any Human Heart (2005).
The latter is one of his “whole life novels” – a phrase he coined in a 2018 Guardian essay for those surprisingly few novels that follow a character from cradle to grave – and is regarded by many as his masterpiece.
Writer’s block has clearly never been an issue for him, although it is something he thinks about.
Elfrida Wing, a character in his 2020 novel Trio, is a writer profoundly blocked 10 years after early success, now sunk in a secret – if for us readers bleakly comic – alcoholism in which she disguises her vodka in Sarson’s white vinegar jars.
“Writing about Elfrida was a nice way of exploring the problem,” Boyd says. “I have a friend who had a seven-year writer’s block, and I take steps to make sure I don’t suffer from it myself.”
Gabriel Dax and Any Human Heart’s Logan Mountstuart are both writers as well as spies, to some extent proxies for Boyd himself, who clearly likes living out alternative lives through his characters.
Time travel is “one of the great pleasures of fiction”, he says, having written his way through the events and crises of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In Trio and the Gabriel Dax trilogy, he does more than travel in time. Both are set in the era when Boyd himself, born in 1952, became aware of what was happening around him, from the political tensions of the Cold War to the social revolution of the ‘Swinging Sixties’.
“I’m revisiting my past,” he says. “Part of the fun is telling younger readers what it was like.”
The books are inhabited by “children of the Thirties,” or earlier, he notes. Gabriel, a university dropout who becomes a travel writer before being tricked into the spy trade, always wears a tie.
He is puzzled by a brush with early hippies in California, and by the strange lyrics of a song he repeatedly hears on the radio: “Someone left a cake out in the rain…”.
Huge amounts of alcohol are imbibed in the books, mainly gin, whisky and (when in Russia) vodka.
“It’s true of the time. People forget how much boozing and smoking went on in those days. My father, who was a doctor, would drink two large pink gins at lunchtime, then in the evening play nine holes of golf and drink half a bottle of whisky.
But he would have found the idea that he was a ‘heavy drinker’ ridiculous.”
The books are also full of history, such as the 1961 death of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, a hero of the early African independence movement whose murder was orchestrated by the Western powers in a murky plot that has still not been fully explained.
Via Gabriel, we witness JFK’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, and in a masterful touch we learn of his assassination through the tears of a receptionist in London. Anybody who remembers that day will remember the tears.
“I was at school with a boy whose father, a US nuclear sub commander, had just met JFK. He wept all day – and we just thought he was being wet!”
Boyd himself was born and brought up in West Africa, although his Scottish background and education (Gordonstoun followed by Glasgow University) are still apparent in his voice.
Boarding at Gordonstoun, where he overlapped with the future King Charles, and his eight years as an Oxford academic may suggest Establishment credentials, but that would be misleading.
“I don’t feel I have some privileged insider position or that I’m part of any elite group,” he says. “Ghana and Nigeria were very much home to me, which meant I’ve always felt on the outside looking in.”
Boyd enjoyed teaching Eng lit students the Romantics – Shelley (the subject of his never-completed PhD thesis), Wordsworth and Coleridge – but was not enamoured of his role as a “jobbing college lecturer”.
Oxford, for him, was a safety net – “I didn’t know any writers and had no idea how to become a novelist” – and he cut himself loose in 1983, by which time he had two published novels, a collection of short stories and a film under his belt.
The experience of an ill-fitting previous career may have boosted his appreciation of the writer’s life, but does the isolation of the garret have a downside?
Possibly – but that is where Boyd’s work for theatre, film and television fits in.
“It gets me out of the house,” he says, “and I like the company of actors and directors. I enjoy working with other people – I’m a good high-pressure collaborator, and the intense six-week rehearsal period is very stimulating. I also love the immediacy of live theatre, the way that every performance is different. When a play of mine is staged, I might see it 20 times, and a line that gets a laugh one night will be ignored the next.”
It is the novel, though, that Boyd holds in the highest esteem – and he has no time for gloomy prognostications about its prospects in the era of AI, TikTok or whatever comes next.
“The novel will continue,” he asserts with confidence. “It is a resilient art form, the most incredibly generous form for a writer. You can do anything – a 500-page novel about an hour in somebody’s life, if you like. It’s the most liberating, endlessly capacious literary medium.”
But is he not worried about young people reading less?
“Reading is cool again,” he shoots back.
“Movie stars and rock stars are starting book clubs. Last year more independent bookshops opened than closed. The literary novel has always been a niche industry, but there are about 400,000 regular book-buyers in the UK, and that audience is pretty consistent, if not growing. So I don’t feel pessimistic in any way.”
Indeed, for a writer who loves the instant gratification and audience feedback of live theatre, there has never been a better time to be a novelist. Far from finding bookshop readings and literary festivals a necessary promotional chore, Boyd gets a real buzz out of them.
“You see your readers face to face,” he says. “This is something very new in the writer’s life. Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene never met their readers.”
How the notoriously prickly Waugh would have handled that is another question. But Boyd is an altogether more gregarious character with a wide constituency of followers.
So, if you can, do snap up a ticket for his forthcoming appearance in Barnes. He’ll be genuinely pleased to see you.
William Boyd will be at St Mary’s Barnes on Sept 25 (8pm); barnesbookfest.org
