Summary
From the award-winning, internationally best-selling author, a beguiling romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a nineteenth-century everyman
"Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game." -- The Guardian
One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is--which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic .
Author Notes
WILLIAM BOYD was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the award-winning author of seventeen highly acclaimed novels and five collections of stories. He divides his time between London and France.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cast as a true story "discovered" by Boyd (Any Human Heart), this raucous picaresque chronicles an Englishman's search for fulfilment and his encounters with prominent historical figures. Cashel Greville Ross is raised by an aunt, his parents having drowned shortly after his birth in 1799. He joins the British army as a young man, serves as a drummer at Waterloo, and travels the globe in search of his fortune. In Pisa, he meets Mary Shelley, who introduces him to her poet husband, Percy, and the couple's good friend Lord Byron. In Africa, he races Richard Francis Burton and John Speke to locate the headwaters of the Nile. After he's almost court-martialed for disobeying orders in Ceylon, Cashel does a stint in debtor's prison in England, founds a brewery in America, and becomes an accidental smuggler of Greek antiquities in Trieste. He also falls in love with numerous beautiful women, among them a countess in Ravenna and a free-spirited Bostonian. Whether in describing military life on the far-flung frontiers of the British empire, detailing the financial perils of 19th-century publishing, or backgrounding Cashel's adventure as Nicaraguan consul to Trieste, this inventively charts the highs and lows of a life extravagantly lived. Once again, Boyd holds the reader spellbound. (Aug.)
Booklist Review
The latest novel from a startlingly consistent stalwart of British fiction is a "whole life" novel. Cashel Greville Ross' outlandish existence, which Boyd playfully suggests is true in a foreword and in notes strewn throughout, quickly moves from his childhood in Ireland to his teens in a plush English house. After familial drama leads Cashel to join the army, throughout his itinerant adult life he repeatedly has tangential roles in major events or encounters with famous historical figures. For instance, he serves at the battle of Waterloo, meets Byron and Shelley, and briefly crosses Stendhal's path (whose The Charterhouse of Parma is a clear model for this novel). Cashel's life reflects the fledgling world of consumer capitalism across the long nineteenth century, during which rapid technological advancements, such as trains and gas lighting, shrank the world and extended the day. While the authorial intrusions feel tacked on, this is a fine novel, and it is a pleasure to be immersed in Boyd's wry prose. As over-the-top as Cashel's life is, his failings and romantic ideals render him compellingly and endearingly human.
Kirkus Review
This appealing picaresque follows its hero's escapades for most of the 19th century. As a boy in Ireland, Cashel Greville Ross wonders one day why his aunt is disheveled just after he has seen a man leaving through the back gate. In his teens he'll discover his true parentage and leave home in anger. For his 17th novel, Boyd turns again to the sort of narrative he fashioned in The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002), and other works, a cradle-to-grave tale touched by historical events and figures. In a prefatory author's note, someone signed as W.B. says he came by the manuscript of Ross' unfinished autobiography and decided to make it whole via fiction. Surveying the text and a few objects that accompany it--such as a musket ball and an amphora shard--W.B. marvels that what's left when we die "can amount to virtually nothing." It's a sobering summation for the lively chronicle that follows. At 15, Ross joins the British army and soon finds himself at the Battle of Waterloo and on the receiving end of a French lance. In Italy, he hangs with Lord Byron and the Shelleys and has a haunting affair with a married contessa. He writes a bestseller in England but is cheated by his publisher and languishes for two years in debtors prison. He brews beer and starts a family in Massachusetts, seeks the source of the Nile, serves as Nicaragua's consul in Trieste, and gets mistaken for Ivan Turgenev in Baden-Baden. His fortunes seesaw giddily, rocked by poor choices and bad luck. It's an amusingly implausible life, and Ross, prey to drink, laudanum, strong passions, and the author's massaging of history, is an always-engaging character. While W.B. may question the heft of Ross' legacy, Boyd continues to enrich his own. A smart, colorful entertainment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Author's Note "I was born somewhere in Scotland, in the early morning of 14th December 1799. Later that day, the former President of the United States of America, George Washington, died at his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. I believe there was no connection between the two events. It is my birthday tomorrow and I will be eighty- two years old." And so begins the unfi nished, disordered, somewhat baffling autobiography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799- 1882), an autobiography-- plus related material-- that came into my possession some years ago. It consists of around a hundred pages of handwritten reminiscences, dated December 1881, along with tied bundles of letters received, drafts of letters sent, some little sketches, maps and plans, some photographs, some published books filled with notes and marginalia, some small paintings, etchings and silhouettes and a few objects-- a tinder box, a musket ball, a belt buckle, a tiny brittle lock of hair tied with a faded silk ribbon, a few silver dollars, a fragment of Greek amphora, and so on. This small but intriguing trove was all that had eventually amounted from the life of this individual. It was, in a real way, everything that remained of him and was a fragmentary history of the time he had spent on this small planet. He had tried to write the story of his life, but failed. However fascinating, these scribbled pages and these few artefacts are not much upon which to construct a portrait of the man-- not much for a lifespan of eighty- odd years. What do we leave behind us when we die? At first it seems prodigious: all that mountain of "stuff " we acquire, all the possessions, the bric-a-brac and copious documentation accumulated over the average life. But inexorably, and surprisingly swiftly, it begins to diminish and after a few decades, a half- century, a century, it can amount to virtually nothing. It depends on who you are, of course-- but most people don't leave much of a trace or record behind them once their goods and chattels are dispersed; once the memories of this or that individual quickly blur and fade as the younger familiars die out themselves. Diaries and letters moulder and become either bland or incomprehensible; legal documents lurk unsought- for in filing cabinets and bank vaults; photographs of family and friends become unidentifiable-- become photographs of anonymous people-- and while anecdote and legend may survive a little longer, assuming that the person did anything of note or achieved any sort of fame, modest or otherwise, the fact is that for the huge majority of people in human history their fate, after a couple of generations or three, is to become effectively unknown, forgotten, a ghost. All that remains is a name on a headstone, a notation in a census- count, an online obituary, a mention in a newspaper and-- if they're lucky-- a date of birth and a date of death. So, who was this Cashel Greville Ross? What was the nature of his real life? How can its unique ontology be reconstructed? At least there is some evidence to hand, to begin with, but how far can it be trusted? There are many large, conspicuous gaps. To attempt to embark on writing a biography of this person-- a total stranger-- a man born well over two hundred years ago, seemed to me to be, if not entirely impossible, then an enterprise that would consist of meagre, unsatisfying supposition, in the end-- all "perhaps," "conceivably," "might have," "possibly." It would be half a life. Maybe that is true of biography in general. A wise man once said, "All biography is fi ction, but fiction that has to fi t the documented facts."* If this first part is correct, then perhaps it's a more interesting proposition to extend that licence. The objective should be to go further than the documented facts, to go beyond that boundary of the factual palisade. And, intriguingly, it is only fiction that allows us to do this. Instead of trying to write a biography of Cashel Greville Ross, I thought there was a very good case to be made that the story of his life, his real life, would, paradoxically, be much better served if it were written instead-- openly, knowingly, candidly-- as a novel. W.B. Trieste, February 2022 * Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov : A Life (new edition 2021), p. vi. Excerpted from The Romantic: A Novel by William Boyd All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
