- This novel was first published in 2002. I started it then but it didn't work for me. After reading Boyd's latest, Love Is Blind, which is magnificent, I wanted to give it another go. I'm so glad I did.
- Any Human Heart is an intricate portrait of a life fully lived in the 20th century, told through journal entries over Logan Mountstuart's long, rich and satisfying life.
- What comes through from the word go is the wit. It’s a lovely, discursive, eloquent book. Boyd’s prose is simple, pleasurable and without ornament. So easily read.
- Mountstuart meets and befriends so many famous names from the 20th century, mainly authors and painters: Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Virginia Wolff; Pablo Picasso; Ian Fleming; H.G.Wells; Cyril Connelly; D.H. Lawrence; Aldous Huxley; Jackson Pollock, and others. There are parties and arguments and enormous amounts of alcohol consumed.
- Boyd loves Paris. His characters are passionate about it. And they constantly travel - to Spain, Greece, America. 'I have to recognise that I'm simply not equipped, temperamentally, to stay at home and live a circumscribed, rural, English life. I absolutely need variety and surprise; I have to have the city in my life - I'm essentially urban by nature - and also the prospect and reality of travel. Otherwise I'll desiccate and die.'
- The two years spent in Switzerland in solitary confinement in a prison during the war are heartfelt and immensely sad. It’s the best part of the novel. The previous months spent in the Caribbean as a naval commander with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are also interesting, although they end badly.
- The book sags in the middle, as LMS succumbs to alcohol and drugs. His successive marriages don’t work out, and his sexual life descends to seediness. His years in New York managing a branch of an art dealership are rather boring.
- He gets older, drunker and fatter. He doesn’t write any more, as his interest in contemporary New York artists increases (but he, wrongly, hates Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist school).
- An extraordinary life and an ordinary life - rich then poor (reduced to eating tinned dog food and hawking far left ‘newspapers’ on the street); many friends then few; known then unknown; celebrated then rejected; best selling books then all out of print; healthy then unwell; ‘... all my sporadic highs and appalling lows, my brief triumphs and terrible losses..’
- Many of his loved ones and close friends, including his children, die tragically, in war and through illness. Very sad.
- He spends his final days in France in the lovely village of Sainte-Sabine to which he escapes after Thatcher is elected. It's a peaceful life in a friendly and supportive community. Although there’s a dark side to the village: ‘the dark and shameful secret’ from the German occupation of France during WW2.
- Many thanks Mark Rubbo, owner of Readings. You pressured me over and over to complete this book. I'm so glad you did.
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