William Boyd's Reading List

"A lot of the books you read when you are young are the ones that stay with you and haunt you. I remember vividly reading this book, which is a war novel, when I was about 18 or 19. I read it on a flight from London to Lagos. I was still at school and was going out to Africa where I lived. I read it in one of those panting, rapt, engaged reads that last 12 hours. At the time, I thought it was the most wonderful novel ever written, partly because of its absurdist sense of humour and the way it looked at war and warfare. Funnily enough I was flying into a war zone then, the Nigerian civil war, and that made Joseph Heller’s war seem almost tame in comparison. It seemed to me to have complete bearing on the craziness that I was witnessing in Nigeria. It was timely, eye-opening and funny as well. Interestingly, I started to read it again about three years ago and I abandoned it almost immediately. I wasn’t enjoying it and I didn’t want to destroy my whole experience of it. It’s the story of a man who has been a member of an air crew, a bomber squadron, in Italy in 1944, a man called Yossarian. He and his colleagues go on bombing missions over Germany and northern Italy. The catch-22 of the title is that Yossarian thinks war is crazy and wants to get out. But that’s a very rational point of view, so nobody would take him at his word. Anybody who thinks that war is an absurd, ghastly, farcical misadventure is in fact incredibly sane, and only the insane would be allowed out of a war zone. So Yossarian’s war is an attempt to prove that he’s insane, when in fact he’s the sanest man on the air base. It’s essentially about Yossarian’s attempt to extricate himself from this utterly ghastly black and deadly farce that he’s involved in. It is a very anti-war novel but written with tremendously skillful, tongue-in-cheek aplomb. It’s not banging an anti-war drum, it’s just showing the inherent lunacy of warfare. It is a great novel. It’s just that I read it at exactly the right time and should stick with those memories and not try to recreate them today. It caught the mood of the 1960s counterculture even though he was talking about a war that took place 20 years earlier. Heller was in that war and I don’t think the book is an oblique look at Vietnam. I think it was an attempt to write up his experiences. Others did it too, but there was something about Heller’s tone of voice – that comic, absurdist view of the conflict – that chimed with this time particularly well. Yes, exactly. Every time he went to the doctor saying “get me out of this”, the doctor would say he couldn’t because he was clearly not insane. This is the bind he finds himself in. It’s a very modern, almost a cool take on warfare, where an American tone of voice seems to get the business of warfare and its inherent and deadly craziness extremely well. That’s my memory of it. The reason I chose it was because it had an enormous effect on me when I was dreaming about being a writer. I did write a war novel in my twenties based on my experience in Nigeria which I’m sure was heavily inspired by Heller, but it wasn’t good enough to show to anybody."

"Yes, I did. I’m almost obsessively interested in Waugh as a writer and I think I’ve read everything he’s written. I think Scoop is his masterpiece. I had fallen upon it before I ever had the chance to adapt it. It’s one of the great comic novels ever written. Waugh’s brilliance was in his comedy. His later novels – Brideshead Revisited , the Sword of Honour trilogy – to me don’t match up to the unique, glittering, malevolent brilliance of the early comedies. The interesting thing about it is that everybody remembers the first third of the book but forgets that a whole lot of it takes place in Africa. Everybody remembers Fleet Street and journalism and Lord Copper and The Daily Beast but the novel is about a classic, almost Shakespearean, case of mistaken identity. The wrong correspondent is sent to cover a war in Ishmaelia – William Boot the nature correspondent is sent, instead of William Boot the war correspondent – and mayhem occurs. In a funny way the book could also be subtitled “How William Boot Loses his Virginity” because it’s a love story as well. When we adapted it into a film, we got quite bad reviews although I think we make a good adaptation of the novel. All the journalists who were reviewing it had only read the Fleet Street stuff and had forgotten about the African civil war in it. It’s hilariously funny, but the thing about Waugh – and this is what makes him great I think – is that his comedy is completely ruthless. He completely expunges sentimentality from it, so his comedies are dark and they chime with my own sense of humour. If Waugh interests me in any single way, it’s the unrelenting ruthlessness of his comic point of view. He will not give you any kind of a sop at all. Decline and Fall , Black Mischief and Scoop are brilliant, dark, sprightly works of a young man in full throttle. Then Waugh turns into something different and the books become, from my point of view, less interesting and more striven for. His brilliance was as a comic writer, and in Scoop you get the apotheosis. The thing about Waugh is that he reinvented himself. The young writer was true to his nature. The various masks that he tried on as he got older affected the way he wrote and saw the world. My theory about Waugh is that this grotesque country squire that he tried to turn himself into was a mask. But he was too intelligent not to realise that, and a kind of self-loathing began to infect him as a man. To me, the later work has brilliance in it but is not as perfectly achieved as those early comedies. Even Vile Bodies , which is a bit of a botch job, is in some ways more original than Brideshead Revisited . I have always championed the earlier novels over the later, more ponderous ones, because I think that’s where his genius lay."

"Not entirely. I think Updike was a brilliant novelist and stylist and also a brilliant critic. But I gave up. I couldn’t keep up with Updike. I think that the short stories are his great legacy. I think the novels are all rather uneven and not fully achieved, with the possible exception of Couples . But Couples is another one of those books that I read at a very young age and it blew me away. Again, I must have been 19 or so when I read it, and for me it was like a window being opened onto the adult world, a world I was about to enter. I suddenly thought that this man understands human nature and the human condition in a way that I had never encountered before. That said, a lot of people regard Couples as his least successful novel because it seems overly preoccupied with sexual shenanigans in New England. I’ve gone back and re-read Couples and it holds up, for me, in way that Catch-22 doesn’t. It’s a brilliantly well-written and observed book. But its relevance to me – and this is why I put it on the list – is because at the time that I read it, veils were stripped from my eyes. I saw the world differently as a result of reading the book. It’s a great experience when that happens to you. You could almost say that Updike was a prolific American Jane Austen in the sense that he wrote about the same world again and again and again. Maybe because he was so prolific, the effects of reading yet another novel about middle-class adultery in New England began to pall. But he was a great prose stylist. The line-by-line pleasures are very genuine. Scott Fitzgerald said – and this very much applies to Updike – that we novelists have our two or three stories to tell, and we tell them again and again as long as someone is prepared to listen. I think this is very true about Updike. His canvas was narrow, but he painted it with incredible detail and astonishing fecundity. But I think in a way that’s going to make him seem oddly parochial. At the centre of Couples , the relationship that he pursues between the Dutch builder and his wife and their various betrayals and adulteries is quite powerful and self-destructive. I wonder if it’s an autobiographical element in Updike’s own life that fuelled that. That’s what my subsequent re-reading of the book has brought home to me. It’s not about wife swapping or sex in the suburbs, it’s about this man’s urge to betray his lovely wife. There is more going on there, and now that Updike has left us, time will tell. I’m sure, as the biographies are written, we might find a different propulsion behind those scenes. I still think the book is a fantastically acute and brilliantly well-observed account of society, even though that society happens to be well-to-do, middle-class America. It gets the human condition really well. In his short stories that richness doesn’t clot or cloy. The 300 or 400 pages of a novel are almost too rich a meal. His short stories somehow cohere in a way that’s more satisfying, for me anyway, than the novels. His Rabbit books are good but they are not great and enduring because they are too much, in a way. I used to teach Updike’s short stories a lot. I pulled them apart and analysed them, and they are really brilliant examples of the genre functioning at their most sophisticated and telling, but of course he wrote hundreds of them. It’s not like Chekhov where there are maybe 20 absolute masterpieces. Updike just seemed to spew out the words and of course you don’t always know where to find the good stuff. Even his four or five huge volumes of criticism – there’s nothing dull about them, they’re full of insights and you just marvel at his energy but it’s almost pathological in its logorrhea. I don’t. I think the answer is: Less is more. When sex scenes are called for in a novel, you shouldn’t shy away from writing them. But you don’t need to go the full DH Lawrence, John Updike route. It’s all about selection to create the sense of power. I think Updike was too in love with his own sumptuous prose style to hold back, so he’s very easy to parody and mock."

"Yes it was. Again, I have deliberately chosen a book that I read when I was young and thinking about becoming a writer. I was born and raised in West Africa and there is very little English literature that deals with that part of the world. If I had been born in Rhodesia, South Africa or Kenya I could find masses of novels that dealt with colonial life. So The Heart of the Matter , which is set in Sierra Leone – a country I had visited several times before I read the book – was revelatory in that I saw the place where I lived in a novel. Again, it’s one of those moments as a reader and a young writer that’s quite extraordinary. I would read Greene’s descriptions of sunset in the tropics or bars in slightly shambolic African towns, and then go out and see them with my own eyes. It’s quite extraordinary to have that experience of being able to authenticate the novelist’s imagination and vision. That’s why the book had a huge impact on me. The story itself is about this policeman Scobie. The mortal sin he commits by having an affair and not confessing seems to me to be completely absurd and bogus, but the setting of the novel and its machinations – the corrupt Syrian, the spying – are great. But what’s wrong with it is this terrible super-structure of Catholic guilt and sin that Greene hammers onto a very good novel about colonial life. Nonetheless, I think it’s a fantastically atmospheric and powerful read, and it really does hold up over the decades as one of his great novels. Greene, like Evelyn Waugh, is one of those writers whom I have become hugely intrigued by, and I have read everything written about him at great length. But it all goes back to that first reading of The Heart of the Matter when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I agree. I think that would be fine, except that Scobie also happens to be a devout Roman Catholic. It’s something that Greene used to make his fiction resonate in a way that, to me, as a faithless reader, seems completely and utterly bogus. It got him discussed as a Catholic novelist, whereas what he’s interested in is the seedy machinations of a policeman in a small colonial town who is broke, unhappily married and meets a young girl. All that sort of stuff was real grist to Greene’s mill. If you look at any of his novels you’ll see that this is what gets his imagination going. But then he thinks he has to make it significant in some way. At that moment, for me, the novel goes wrong and I just don’t buy it. But it doesn’t detract from the novel’s almost tactile power, a brilliantly rendered version of a life I had experienced in my own slightly tangential way. Everything he said or wrote you have to re-read and read between the lines. He didn’t say or do anything unknowingly. He was a highly sophisticated, manipulative person who knew exactly what he was trying to achieve with his various interviews and pronouncements. There’s no way that The Heart of the Matter could have been a comedy in the Evelyn Waugh sense. I actually don’t think Greene was a particularly good comic writer. He gets the slightly desperate seediness of life so well and I think his best novels, for me, are the ones that are to do with people trapped in situations where they can’t get out."

"Chekhov was a later passion. I always liked the plays. I remember writing about a film version of The Cherry Orchard in the early 1980s when I was a TV critic at The New Statesman . That production really made me look at Chekhov again and re-read the short stories, which I had read but not with the attention they should have had. I now regard the short stories as far superior to the plays. Funnily enough, that’s the same point of view that exists in Russia. They see Chekhov as a giant of the short story form who happened to write a few plays, whereas in the West, we see him as a playwright who happened to write short stories. The Russian point of view seems to me to be completely valid, and the minute you have read all the mature short stories you can see he has lifted the plays right out of them. His stories are extraordinary and mould breaking in the sense that nobody wrote short stories like Chekhov and now everybody writes short stories like Chekhov. As I have said before, we’re all Chekhovian now. He’s a very modern spirit who happened to write his great work at the end of the 19th century. But it’s completely 21st century thinking, it seems to me. The one I really like is his longest short story, called My Life . It’s almost a novella. In it I think you’ll find every Chekhovian element. If you go to other short stories such as The House with a Mezzanine or The Steppe , you find bits of Chekhov. But in My Life , which is not remotely autobiographical, you find the whole of Chekhov. It’s a long rambling story about an idealistic young man in a provincial town. If somebody asks “What is Chekhov about?”, tell them to read My Life and they will get everything. Well, the other thing you have to remember is that he knew he was going to die very young. By his mid-twenties he knew he had tuberculosis. One of his brothers had died of it, and he was a doctor so he knew exactly what the course of the disease would be. He died at the age of 44. Being a doctor was a way of earning money and was something he did gladly and with zeal, but he wanted to write and his greatest ambition, he said, was to be a free artist. His doctoring, of course, brought him into contact with every kind of individual in society, but my feeling is that it was the knowledge of his impending death that shaped his view of the world and that went into his art – which has been a massive influence on 20th century literature in the Western world. Not just in England and America but also in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Chekhov’s world view is hugely, almost pervasively influential. So pervasive that you can hardly identify it with the original author."