Roddy Lumsden Reviews 'Bamboo'

Is he Scottish? said my other half, noticing William Boyd on the top of my Scottish books pile. He is, of course, but it's true that many of his readers are not aware of this. Boyd spent much of his childhood in West Africa, leading to a lasting fascination with the continent, but he returned to Scotland to see off the rigours of Gordonstoun and Glasgow University before moving to England, where he has mostly lived since.

What surprised me was the realisation that Boyd is still only in his early 50s. He has certainly achieved a lot, and he was an early starter – by the age of 30 he was working on TV screenplays and busy with his third novel (the knockabout take on little America Stars and Bars). Since then, he has
produced a handful of novels, including the award-winners Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon as well as three collections of short fiction, which many of his admirers think is his strongest card in a well-dealt hand.

Away from fiction, Boyd has been an active reviewer of books, television (he was the New Statesman's TV critic for some years) and art (he has a long association with Modern Painters magazine). Bamboo (Penguin) is a great chunk of a book which gathers together the best of Boyd's criticism, as well as sundry prose from various sources (book introductions, memoirs, magazine articles, travel pieces, cultural comments). They 'amount to a form of intellectual portrait, I suppose,' he says in his introduction, with a typical touch of undercutting doubt.

Bamboo contains several 'Personal A-Z's – a novel form Boyd seems fond of – take a subject (Chekov, England Vs France) and extemporise in 26 short sections. There are also some takes on aspects of modern society – in fact, the back cover blurb makes much of Boyd's articles on cabs and caffs, and with his mordant wit, I could have done with more of these Barthesian lucubrations on quirky topics, and less reprints of old reviews. But such books are always curate's eggs, and though it is unlikely that anyone will harbour equal interests in Charlie Chaplin, Flaubert, Liberia and tussles with publishers, most readers here will be drawn to a writer whose effortless style they admire.

It is rewarding to see Boyd including one or two early pieces of prose so you can see his command of language evolving – a piece on Oxford from 1980 is clumsy in places, slightly overcooked, but you can spot the talent (a glue-sniffing boy's brain described as a 'numb fist'). Among the pieces I enjoyed most here were his stark reflections on the East London borough of Newham, which read almost as prose poems. Boyd is, after all, know primarily as a writer of place, but one more engaged, more cynical than the traveloguist, and he is drawn to the flaws in places he knows well.

Perhaps the best writing in Bamboo is saved for his passions, especially fiction and art. Though a kindly literary critic on the whole, he can be dismissive of the tics of other writers, especially those who stray towards the sentimental or the non-traditional. In art too, Boyd's tastes are fairly traditional, and it helps to be a little eccentric or vivacious if you are to get past his bullshit detector. Howard Hodgkin's bright splatters are deemed joyful, while a fine piece on Stanley Spencer draws out the painter's relationship with his subjects. In a piece on the late painter Sarah Raphael, a personal friend, Boyd remarks that 'At the very root of all significant art is the notion of virtuosity'. Bamboo shows the virtuoso Boyd spreading his talents nimbly and widely.