William Boyd, Trio

 

- Boyd has a wonderful way of bringing English society to life. He's a sharp and insightful observer. 

- Trio is a delicious story of movie making in London in the late sixties. The world is experiencing radical change - assassinations, student-led riots, sexual liberation, gay legalisation. Elfrida Wing is a successful author, Talbot Kydd, a film producer, and Anny Viklund a celebrated young and beautiful actress. They are all connected via the movie.

- There’s a comic dimension to the story. Rather strange names are a feature. Boyd’s surely having fun: Rodrigo Tipton and his children Butterfly and Evergreen; Troy Blaze; Cornell Weekes; Gianluca Mavrocordato; Sylvia Slaye; Ferdie Meares; Janet Headstone; Nigel Farthingly; Yorgos Samsa; Calder McPhail; Maitland Bole. 

- And the film is called Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon. The production is spinning out of control however, as spivs and grifters muscle in to try to exploit the movie for marketing and financial advantage. Preying 'friends' are constantly asking for favours.

- Our trio are feeling the pressure of all this and the changing times in general. They are hardly coping. Meaningless marriages are hiding desperation, despair and hopelessness. Drugs and alcohol are centre stage. In the end they are forced to take radical actions to free themselves.

- There are some lovely, cheeky observations about Englishness dotted throughout, that are classic Boyd: 

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse....Elfrida actually disliked the novel, with its footling detail and its breathy neurasthenic apprehension of the world, all tingly awareness and high-cheekboned sensitivity. 

They both drank to fill the silence. Both lost in the awkward formality of their personas...chronic social ill-at-easeness being the English middle-class status quo...the banal politesse of their conversation tiresome and awkward.

Charm, she thought: a very illusive English concept, very loaded. To her it meant closed, polite, coldly affable, able to make conversation about nothing.