The protagonist of William Boyd’s new novel claims he is “not a gregarious traveller”. But like his creator – the author of 16 previous novels, five short-story collections, some nonfiction and several stage plays – Cashel Greville Ross covers great distances. His inclinations towards aloneness mingle with his restless, romantic nature to send him from his birth in County Cork, Ireland, in 1799 to Oxford, London, Brussels and Zanzibar. As part of the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, Cashel finds himself questioning his own ethics. As a guest of the Romantic poets in Pisa, he finds himself adrift in his own libido. Along the way, trapped by “the vocabulary of sightseeing”, Cashel sometimes succumbs to every travel writer’s worst fear: “He was finding it hard to be original.” But as with Logan Mountstuart, the hero of Boyd’s masterwork, Any Human Heart, Cashel ultimately emerges as a one-off – an inimitable character, whether he knows it or not. What other hero in literature could have suffered the nicknames “the Cashelmite”, “Cash-Cash-Coo” and “Cashelnius the Great”? And who else could have been present for so many of history’s key moments?
The Romantic starts with a playful “author’s note” by “W.B.” that invites us to suspend our disbelief. Like the note that opens Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, another novel of outlandish adventure (and one that beat Any Human Heart to win the Booker prize in 2002), it suggests we are about to read a story based on one the author encountered in “real” life: the “unfinished, disordered, somewhat baffling autobiography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799-1882)”. The discovery of this manuscript supposedly led “W.B.” to wonder: “What do we leave behind us when we die?”
