Love Is Blind by William Boyd – alchemic storytelling of the highest quality

Read William Boyd’s latest book ‘Love is Blind’. It’s terrific. Great: #bloodymarvelousloveisblind. If you are familiar with Mr. Boyd’s work and need no further encouragement, don’t bother reading on. You’ve got it. Use that Amazon One Click button NOW, and it may even be in your Christmas stocking.

Mr. Boyd’s shtick is that he always takes you, dear reader, into a life in a not so far away parallel universe where you once may have lived, perhaps be already living, might wish you had the chance to occupy, the life of his protagonist. Never really ‘hero’, as there are seldom out and out heroes in Mr. Boyd’s complex oeuvre, spanning ‘A Good Man in Africa,” published in 1981, to his latest, ‘Love is Blind’. One of his skills is to mold first-rate characters from second-class clay.

Meet Brodie Moncur, the central character in ‘Love is Blind’.  No prizes for guessing that he is a Scot, an eldest son of a manse in Liethen Manor, Peebleshire. Parallel universe time. The tributary river which flows through Peebleshire into the Tweed is actually the “Leithen”. Transposing the “e” and the “i” is a subtle sleight of hand to unsettle you, dear reader; at least, readers who know their Borders geography. Or, perhaps Mr. Boyd just can’t spell “Leithen”. Benefit of the doubt time!

There, his father is the minister, Malky Moncur, a drunken, intolerant, firebrand, hellfire and damnation orator making hard cash by filling his kirk with swooning ladies who come from near and far to be terrified out of their wits on a Sunday morning. We all know one of those.

The Rev. Moncur hates his son, which spins the emotional dynamo driving Brodie to escape the stifling life of Edinburgh and nearby Liethen Manor. He is a gifted piano tuner with piano manufacturers, Channon &Co. in Edinburgh’s George Street.

Parallel universe time again. There actually was a piano manufacturer in Edinburgh in the early 19^th century, Muir Wood and Company, with a shop on Leith Walk, and workshop on Calton Hill, later rechristened Small, Wood and Company at 20 Waterloo Place. Until the doors closed in 1828 it underwent the same sort of personality driven corporate gyrations as Mr. Boyd’s Channon &Co., which Mr. Boyd locates more centrally in George Street.

Even the choice of the “Channon” name is a canny one. There is no “Channon” piano manufacturer on record. But, it sounds as if there should be. Why? Slightly off key, there is, of course, “Challen”. I know, because for 14 years a long suffering, heroic Glasgow spinster music teacher attempted to instill in me musical skills on her “Challen” baby grand in a flat in Glasgow’s Ruthven Street. If I’m opened up post mortem “Challen” will be found seared on …. well, something.

I may be barking up the wrong tree here – or simply barking – but I think Mr. Boyd seems to have a sharp eye for picking detail – names, places and situations – that might chime with his readers’ real life experiences. For another reader it is perhaps some other detail. For this reader the hook was the Channon piano.

Brodie travels to Paris to champion Channon &Co.’s sales in La Ville Lumiere. There, he falls in with John Kilbarron, a fading, alcohol-fuelled Irish concert pianist and his decidedly dodgy manager brother Malachi. Kilbarron is desperately trying to preserve his European reputation as “The Irish Liszt”. His hands are slowly giving out. Brodie becomes indispensable as Kilbarron’s piano tuner, as he can make the keys “feather-light, sir” with the subtle addition of lead weights.

Then, Brodie falls in love with Kilbarron’s mistress, a wistful second rank Russian mezzo-soprano, Lika Blum. It’s the proverbial bolt from the blue, “blind” love at first sight, unsought and undeniable. I remember that happening when I was 11 years old and saw my first E Type Jaguar.

They dicker around with some ambiguous correspondence – is Brodie being led on? – then: “They shook hands, Brodie squeezing hers as hard as he dared. He felt the pulse race, the oxygen need.” That hand squeeze fires the starting gun for a catalogue of tempestuous events: a move to St Petersburg, the sparking of a true “hands very on” affair, discovery, a confrontation with the Irish Liszt and a duel.

Yes, Eugene Onegin, eat your heart out. Here’s a Scottish piano tuner pinching Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s famously chilling opera Act 2, scene 2, squaring up to a pissed Irish pianist. Dueling isn’t what it used to be. Kilbarron cheats. Brodie shoots him point blank in self-defence. On we go to a chase across the globe by hellhound Malachi seeking revenge, not least because, as it turns out, he is Lika’s husband. Complicated, moi?

Mr. Boyd’s mise en scene is meticulous. The action careens from Edinburgh, Paris, St. Petersburg, Biarritz, Nice, Geneva, Vienna, Graz, Trieste and finally (whew!) The Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

No location is undersold, or detail scrimped. In St Petersburg, the Irish Liszt is under the patronage of Varvara Nikolaevna Vadinova, a wealthy widow and patron of the arts, much in the mold of Peggy Guggenheim. This provides an opportunity for Mr. Boyd to paint a vivid portrait of St. Petersburg ben pensant – and occasionally mal pensant – pre-revolutionary society.

The awkward, colonial status of The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is explored through the relationship of Brodie’s unlikely employer, Miss Paget Arbogast, a social anthropologist – an intellectual way of saying frustrated sexual predator. Colonial themes are common in Mr. Boyd’s work. He was born in Accra, Gold Coast.

Throughout the novel there lurks the device of an ominous background ticking sound, the clock of Brodie Moncur’s life running down, ebbing away to the tick-tock of a tuberculosis time bomb. Mr. Boyd plants this terrible device, which we all know must inevitably bookend Brodie’s life, in his lungs early in the plot. It fades from the reader’s memory, then pounces randomly, adding urgency to Brodie’s frenetic activity in pursuit of Lika.

This episodic advance and retreat of the chronic disease, outcome inevitable (ask any Puccini heroine), but never explicitly acknowledged is as much a “blind”, relentless force driving Brodie on as is his love for Lika.

The book bristles with sly observations. At Liethen Manor station there is a grumbling revolt by the horse drawn cabmen against the introduction of smelly motorcars, which are pinching their business. Think black cab versus Uber. Brodie takes a car.

It is Mr. Boyd’s habit to understand, with hard researched precision, any unfamiliar skill or profession practised by his characters. In “Love is Blind” step up piano tuning. He then explains it to the reader by blending the detail into the plot.

Pianos from different manufacturers are subtly different instruments. “19^th Century Pianism” was a populist movement depending on a crescendo of pyrotechnic keyboard skills. Amongst the stars of the day were Czerny, who taught Liszt, Kalkbrener and Paganini. Today we have Lang Lang. Let’s leave Liberace out of it – to burn both ends of his own candles in peace.

There was a noted difference between the tone and weight of Viennese and English pianos. Mr. Boyd jumps on these complexities, explaining at length, but never, never redundantly, tuning techniques, the shaping of hammers, and the weighting of keys to assist the increasingly crippled “Irish Liszt”.

Much of the later action is driven by John Kilbarron’s theft of a melody, “My Bonny Boy,” which Brodie first played to Lika. Kilbarron turns it into a tone poem, ostensibly of his own composition. His career is rekindled, but the consequential mutual resentment kindled sets him and Brodie on an inevitable, fatal, collision course.

“My Bonny Boy” is a tear-jerker and Mr. Boyd takes the trouble to describe why music of this genre sets the ducts aflow when Brodie first plays the piece to Lika.

“See?” he said to Lika, “Rising sevenths, falling fourths – suspensions, passing notes, …..There! A falling sixth, a rising ninth. G Flat minor to D flat Major then – this is what you don’t expect – D flat minor ninth. The unexpected chord.” Brodie’s unexpected chord in life is Lika.

Mr. Boyd’s explanation of why music “works” is the sharpest, shortest and most comprehensible I’ve come across. Some say Schoenberg “opens the brain and cleans it out” with his atonal scalpel. (vide last week’s Reaction podcast). I’m sure they’re right. Personally, I think Schoenberg uses hammers. Purification has its place in the musical pantheon. But I’ll go for Brodie’s unexpected chord any day.

Personal anecdote. Mr. Boyd and his wife Susan happen to have been among my circle of friends at the University of Glasgow in the 70’s. I can’t boast the word “close.” He and I last met for lunch in 1989. So, when I sent a congratulatory email to his publisher and asked that it be passed on I was astonished to receive a warm response from Will within a couple of hours. We shall lunch again. That’s the measure of this mindful, generous-spirited man.

You will be glad you entered the universe of Brodie Moncur. I kid you not, after reading “Love is Blind” you could become a passing good piano tuner. Maybe Miss Paget Arbogast is still out there, in The Andoman and Nicobar Islands, pining for you to step ashore?

But, in my universe I think I shall draw the line at chasing mezzo-sopranos across the Russian steppes and fighting duels with Irish pianists – at least until the end of 2018.