Love is Blind

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It is inevitable that the towering success of Any Human Heart will define the rest of his career – and many might miss the quirky, low-key comedy of his earlier novels – but this fine, touching and clever book is the best thing he’s written since and deserves similar adulation. The novel is set in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on Brodie Moncur, a Scottish piano tuner. Boyd’s books have included more serious (and more funny) efforts — like “ Any Human Heart” (2003), a vigorous account of a 20th-century life, and the richly nuanced, darkly comic “ An Ice-Cream War” (1983) — as well as slighter, larkier ones like this. There is one brilliant set piece I won't go into, but it’s so well done I sure my eyes were bulging out of my head as I read it.

love to Lika: 'Brodie kept a running calculation: from September 1898 to May 1899 - no sexual congress with Lika. Then they turned into the gravelled carriage drive of the manse, set in a wide dark garden filled with ornamental conifers – monkey puzzles, larches and cedars – and beech trees.At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers. It’s Brodie’s all-consuming love for Lika which now propels the story forward, as he loses his job at Channon’s and joins Kilbarron and his entourage on a luxurious sponsored trip to pre-revolutionary Russia .

I think of him as the equivalent of an IT expert, who can successfully fix computers – a skill in worldwide demand now as piano tuning was then. It’s at this point in the story that Boyd discreetly begins to show his hand – to shine a light back on some of the threads and details he’s scattered earlier, and to reveal what sort of novel this is.

The only strange thing – if you double your stake each time you lose – is that sometimes you can be betting 40 francs to win 2 – so you need a substantial float. A collection of his non-fiction writings, 1978-2004, entitled Bamboo, was published in October 2005. But then that’s always been the tension at the heart of Boyd’s work: that he gives us life’s game of snakes and ladders in the form of carefully plotted, self-consciously structured novels. But we are offered a key right on the first page, in the two quotes chosen by Boyd to frame his novel, from Russian and Victorian novelists.

Interestingly, I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of loving a book more than many others on GR. He now carries the Russian fire inside him, and the confrontations are as powerful, as emotional as his time in exile. When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. The doctor recommends that Brodie Moncur leaves Paris for a sunnier, drier climate and that he avoids emotional turmoil, if possible.

His fin de siècle hero — a sensualist, as is Boyd’s wont in his young male stars — is Brodie Moncur, a quick-witted Scot with a gift for tuning pianos. I wasn’t quite sure about his weird and dysfunctional family (especially his repulsive father) other than as a device to get him to leave Scotland and stay away. His severe short-sightedness serves as a metaphorical reminder that we should hold his perspective at arm's length. But there’s no philosophical armature to Love Is Blind, only the most convoluted of bildungsromans . Love is Blind is an epic love story that grew in power, hooked me in totally and saw me reading long into the night to finish.

He somehow gets into more complications as he follows Lika, John Kilbarron and his brother/agent Malachi Kilbarron to St. So struck, in fact, that he invents a noun to describe the feeling: impendingment, and then an adverb, impendingmently, to qualify it. At 24, he’s handsome and has perfect pitch, but is also (in a slight twist on the archetypal blind piano tuner) severely short-sighted. It is the little details that provide the hook - like the skills of a piano tuner, and virtuoso pianist.

this book offers a fascinating insight into how the instrument works and it also plays with the trope of tortured artistic souls albeit the elements that may seem half-familiar from the lives of genuine classical composers and performers are amplified in the case of the monstrous Kilbarron - if you like, he is John Field gone bad!