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New Confessions
William Boyd
Editions
| Cover |
Publisher |
ISBN Number |
Price |
Buy |
| pbk |
Penguin |
0140106995 |
£6.99 |
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Review
In my view, this is Boyd’s best novel, and has some claim to being that elusive beast, “the definitive novel of the twentieth century”. Unashamedly ambitious, it is the story of James Todd. Born in 1899, he recounts his Scottish childhood, his service in the trenches during the First World War, making films in Berlin during the 1930s, and finally winding up in Hollywood, a slightly sad old fellow, betrayed by events. Each of these periods is a virtuoso set-piece – there is no better account in fiction of the trenches, and they are knit together by the sustained sense of the narrator’s peronality. As always, the pace of the writing is tremendous, but you also care about this man’s wayward career - you feel the pathos of a continous identity at the mercy of a fractured world. This novel is Boyd’s longest, and it feels less neat than his others: and all the better for it. - review by Johnny de Falbe
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