It is hard to think of another contemporary author who quietly marches his readers so relentlessly towards death It’s a great achievement by Boyd to produce this book and it’s thoroughly enjoyable with flashes of humour, warmth and fascinating insights into some interesting real- life characters like Byron and Richard Burton from the Nineteenth century. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Secondly, the book is written in the third person. Boyd claims in a prefatory note that he has come across some disjointed scraps of a memoir by Ross and was thinking of writing his biography, but has decided that because the facts are so scanty, “the story of his life… would, paradoxically, be much better served if it were written instead – openly, knowingly, candidly – as a novel”. He is romantic… Adventures call him… He finds himself in Italy where he inevitably meets the greatest romantics of the time – Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron… But one thing that does stand out is that he never gives up. He doesn’t dwell on his misfortune but simple strides boldly on to the next adventure. He is a glass half full guy, a romantic. Is he ‘the worlds biggest preposterous romantic fool, or a man who knows what true love is.’ A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century. Maybe it’s my upbringing: I’m a Scot, but I was born in Africa, so I felt more at home in west Africa than in Edinburgh. If somebody asks where I’m from, I say: “How long have you got?” Cashel gets called an Irish cunt, an English cunt and a Scottish cunt – that was highly deliberate, because, you know, what is he?

Cashel’s relationships with women tend to be interrupted by either his roving nature or his impetuosity. But there is one woman in particular with whom he becomes so besotted that their eventual parting becomes something that forever haunts him. This is a key theme that becomes a focus of his thoughts and actions as he reaches an age where he increasingly starts to reflect on his life. Can he eventually find happiness, or at least closure? This becomes something that I found had an emotional impact on me as I neared the end of this tale. I’d enjoyed it to this point but now I was somewhat obsessed about knowing how this would all conclude.

The lifelong association that Cashel carries with him as a Waterloo veteran reminded me of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March in which Captain Joseph Trotta saves the life of the young Kaiser Frank Joseph 1, on the battlefield at Solferino. Henceforth the “Hero of Solferino” is a label which travels with the Trotta family.The writing is a joy and Boyd has that skill of conjuring the sights and sounds of place and time that effortlessly transports the reader. Though this is quite a lengthy book I just didn’t want it to end.

The Romantic is one of the books on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 but it had been on my RADAR long before that. The Romantic has been compared by other readers to one of William Boyd’s earlier books, Any Human Heart, which is also a ‘whole life’ story, albeit set in a different period. I haven’t read that book although it is on my virtual TBR pile. Two strong women become central to the story; Contessa Raphaella Rezzo; and widow Mrs Frances (Frannie) Broome. Both women are interesting but from their character descriptions, and their actions, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two, who occupy different parts of the world, and the narrative. Boyd uses the description ‘cavaliere servante’ to describe Raphaella.Cashel is not a real person, of course, although Boyd does his best to convince us that he is. The book is presented as a biography, complete with footnotes, pieced together from a bundle of letters, notes, maps and photographs which apparently fell into Boyd’s hands several years ago. It’s not a new idea, but it’s very cleverly done here and I can almost guarantee that you’ll be googling things to see if they’re true, even while knowing that they can’t possibly be! William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) – adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart – and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. His new book, The Romantic, is set in the 19th century and presents itself as a biographical fiction inspired by the personal papers of one Cashel Greville Ross, a Scots-born Irishman who fought at Waterloo, met Shelley, smuggled Greek antiquities and set out in search of the source of the Nile, among other adventures. Boyd, whom Sebastian Faulks has called “the finest storyteller of his generation”, grew up in Ghana and Nigeria and lives in London and the Dordogne, from where he spoke over Zoom. The Romantic by William Boyd was the novel I enjoyed most this year. It's incredibly ambitious, its hero moving from Co Cork to London, then from Waterloo to Zanzibar, and at one point even joining the East Indian Army, but it was such an easy, indulgent read Sathnam Sanghera, The Times, Best Books of the Year

Unfortunately Cashel Greville Ross doesn’t have the charisma of Boyd’s earlier “whole-life” heroes – or heroine, in the case of Sweet Caress. Like Amory Clay in that novel, John James Todd (in The New Confessions) and Logan Mountstuart (in Any Human Heart) were born shortly before World War One and their lives encapsulate the 20th century whose twists and ironies Boyd instinctively knows well. He is less at home in the preceding century and, as a result, The Romantic fails to achieve the same depth and focus, while often flirting with the superficial and absurd. “What’s going on in the world, Ross, do you know? I haven’t seen a newspaper in months,” a friend asks in the south of France, to which the Romantic unromantically replies: “Neither have I. In Arles, the other day, I heard that Simon Bolivar was made the President of Peru.” It must have been the talk of the town! An Ice-Cream War is William Boyd’s sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of conflict, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Cue Waterloo; demobilisation with honours; a brief spell as an officer in the massacre-prone East India Company army in Ceylon; then on to Italy, where Cashel arrives in Pisa just in time to become pals with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron. “Byron in Pisa,” Cashel exclaims. “Who’d have thought?”A panoramic story, at its heart the hopeless, impetuous romantic that is Cashel Greville Ross. William Boyd is a superb story teller. The conceit of the tale is that he is merely reworking the surviving notes, letters and mementoes of Ross into a fictionalised biography. Footnotes enhance the joke. I especially enjoyed finding out where in the British Museum could be found the Lion of Glymphonos, a particularly impressive piece of looted Greek statuary. Cashel is a wonderful creation, Don Quixote to Ignatz’ Sancho Panza and Raphaella’s Dulcinea. Boyd is brilliant at evoking historical settings and this picaresque novel is similar to some of his other books in some ways such as the main character’s romantic entanglements and European settings. William Boyd has tried on many different generic hats in his 40 years as an author, but he reports that his readers have engaged particularly deeply with his “whole life novels”. The New Confessions, Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress – purported memoirs or journals in which the narrators, whose lives all span the first 70-odd years of the 20th Century, record decades’ worth of being buffeted by historical upheaval and complex personal relationships – look set to be Boyd’s monuments.