As of 2024 William Boyd (Novels – William Boyd) has written 18 novels plus a number of short stories and screenplays. The New Confessions is a good recommendation to start enjoying this author’s fiction. The summary is as follows.
From his birth in Edinburgh in 1899, John James Todd was doomed. Emerging from an angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau’s Confessions, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten.
Boyd has an enviable grasp of historical settings and portrays his scenes in rich and dense detail. Turn-of-century Edinburgh, the First World War trenches, 1920s Berlin, inter-war and post-war Los Angeles are all brought convincingly to life.
The author has used the ‘Confessions’ (1789) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a template for the film career of John James Todd. The latter’s meditations and recollections on a Mediterranean island in 1972 re-present the bewildered and paradoxical mentality of the Genevan of the 1700s. There is a detectable acknowledgment that a completed understanding of the world, and of the human situation, is out of our reach.
To continue enjoying William Boyd consider the following: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize), An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet), Restless (2006, Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006), Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009), Waiting for Sunrise (2012), Sweet Caress (2015), Love is Blind (2018), Trio (2020), and The Romantic (2022). Boyd’s novels and stories have been published around the world and have been translated into over thirty languages.
Check if this engaging novel of William Boyd is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
592 pages in Penguin
First published 1987
ISBN-13 : 978-0141046914
