Any Human Heart reminds me a lot of a previous William Boyd book, The New Confessions, in that it’s a life story.
A couple of years ago, William Boyd published a book that I’ve yet to read called Nat Tate – an American Artist which is fake biography. I believe that when it was originally published, it wasn’t made clear that it was a fiction.
This book takes that a little further and we follow the life of Logan Mountstuart, an interesting character, hitherto unmentioned in history. Yet he rubs shoulders with many of the great and the good of the 20th century, and is always somewhere interesting.
The book takes quite a wide view of the years it examines, and I must admit that I absolutely loved it. I suppose if I had one criticism, I was personally disappointed that Land disappeared so early in procedings. I suppose the reality is that we do lose contact with some of our closest friends far too easily.
It’s all very well living in the age of the internet and friendsreunited (if you were such great friends, how did you lose touch quite so quickly), but we meet many people on our travels.
The book takes the form of diary entries from Logan’s journal, and that certainly means that we can only concentrate on those who surround Logan at any given moment.
I must admit that the novel is the first for some time to actually make me sit back and consider my life so far. Profound? Maybe. Deep? Possibly. Worth reading? Certainly.