There was part of me as I read through Alistair Owen’s extensive interviews with William Boyd that wondered whether the whole thing might not be a characteristically elaborate Boydian joke. It was Boyd of course who, along with Gore Vidal and David Bowie, constructed the character of Nat Tate, a hoax abstract expressionist, about whom he wrote a fine (and entirely fictional) biography. It turns out that Owen does exist; indeed, he’s already produced a similar book of interviews with the film-maker Bruce Robinson. Owen is a big Boyd fan: such a fan, in fact, that he often seems to know Boyd’s work better than the man himself, helpfully reminding the author of plotlines and characters’ names, making sure that Boyd knows that he’s watched even the deleted scenes on the DVD of the TV adaptation of Any Human Heart. The questions are doozies – Owen is no Jeremy Paxman and never misses a chance to lob a compliment in with his prompts. It makes for a fascinating read, as one seeks to get to the bottom of the dynamic between the older, wildly successful novelist and his simpering interrogator – younger, an aspirant novelist himself and clearly slightly smitten by Boyd.
A few pages in, I was feeling bad-tempered about the whole project. Such is Owen’s regard for his subject that he doesn’t feel able to separate the author’s statements into paragraphs, meaning that several of the longer answers spool over several dense pages. I’m a huge Boyd fan – I’ve read every novel he’s written and loved most of them – but even my heart sank slightly when Owen, after stating apologetically that he has not been able to cover the whole of Boyd’s journalistic output, or his unproduced screenplays, in the interviews, announces proudly that he and Boyd did, however, “talk about 17 novels, five collections of short stories, 12 films, five television series and three stage plays” during their 33 hours of interviews conducted over Zoom during lockdown. The book was initially meant to come out to celebrate Boyd’s 70th birthday in 2022, but Covid-19 stalled things and so here we have it, hot on the heels of Boyd’s superb (it’s clearly catching) 17th novel, The Romantic.
